Immersive virtual reality in the psychology classroom: What purpose could it serve?

Abstract

Virtual reality is by no means a new technology, yet it is increasingly beingused, to different degrees, in education, training, rehabilitation, therapy, and home entertainment. Although the exact reasons for this shift are not thesubject of this short opinion piece, it is possible to speculate that decreased costs, and increased performance, of the technology may be key drivers in this change. As immersive virtual environments are increasingly integratedinto a wide range of practices it is appropriate to consider, as academics and teachers of psychology, what purpose they could serve in the psychology classroom.

Teaching psychology in virtual reality 2: Wherever you learn, there you are.

“…The current results are the first to directly show that students feel more socially present with their instructors while watching asynchronous psychology learning videos online in 3D, by wearing a HMD (VR headset), than when viewing the same instructional content in standard 2D format. Our results therefore give empirical support for Coxon’s (2013) insinuation that using VR to teach students in an one-on-one format may encourage a felt sense of interpersonal interaction with the instructor even in cases of asynchronous online learning, thus increasing satisfaction during the learning process.…”

“…In effect, it appears that VR increases students’ sense that asynchronous online learning is taking place in the here and now . As social and spatiotemporal presence ratings were positively correlated, it is possible that students felt as if they were being more guided by and interacted with during the lessons when delivered in a VR format, partly due to their also feeling more spatially situated in the classroom, a notion supported by Kintu et al (2017) and implied by Coxon (2013). Moreover, students may feel more temporally present with the learning activity when taking place in VR, as if the instructor was delivering her or his instruction live (synchronously) even during an asynchronous online lesson (Frewen et al, 2022).…”

“…As one possible remedy to the social distancing effects of asynchronous online learning, more than a decade prior, Coxon (2013) suggested that virtual reality (VR) technology could enable a virtual learning environment encouraging of the feeling that lessons are occurring in a one-on-one format, increasing students’ felt sense of interaction with the instructor and possibly leading to a higher experience of presence during lessons. However, while much research has investigated learning of other subjects in VR (Coban et al, 2022; Radianti et al, 2020), little research has applied VR to psychology learning (e.g., Rogers et al 2022).…”

“…Both of these limitations owed in part to the study being conducted during a period in which universities had discontinued in-person research activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional limitations included the lack of direct measurement of students’ experience of social presence to directly assess Coxon’s (2013) ideas concerning the potential of VR to increase students’ felt sense of one-on-one interaction with their instructors; investigation not only of the spatiotemporal but also the social aspects of the experience of presence would therefore be advantageous. More, the previous study lacked assessment of potential negative consequences of use of VR, specifically, adverse side effects relating to nausea and/or disequilibrium (e.g., Arshad et al, 2021) and perceived difficulties that interacting with VR technology will be cumbersome or distracting and make learning more difficult (e.g., Majka, 2021).…”