Teaching and Learning with Virtual Reality Apps
While many VR games are available for VR headsets, educational applications for higher education are rare. This was the reason for our team to develop educational VR apps for Meta Quest headsets. We are just at the beginning but continue to develop more VR apps together with related teaching strategies.
At the current state of technology, VR apps are not well suited (yet) to substitute for entire lectures or seminars. Instead, VR apps should be viewed as learning experiences — like a field trip — because they immerse students in an interactive virtual learning environment that otherwise does not exist. For example, it would be fantastic to take students into a museum where several giant 3D diagrams display data science applications that students can interact with. While this is not feasible in reality, educational VR apps can deliver similar experiences in the classroom. Although a VR session requires some preparation, it is far less work than organizing a field trip.