Standford University Hosts First-Ever All-VR Course
With The COVID-19 Pandemic, Most Educational Institutions Have Ended Up Adopting Video Conferencing For Teaching. Stanford University Has Recently Taken A Step Up. Indeed, A Teacher From Stanford Has Started To Lead A Course Session Entirely In Virtual Reality (VR). This Is A First In The History Of The Institution.
A communications professor at Stanford University, James Bailenson has been teaching the “University’s Virtual People” course since 2003. Recently, he decided to conduct this training entirely in VR.
He did not yet know whether the technology required for this would be effective or not. This is the software called Engage. Fortunately, this tool was ready to use at the time of the summer session of the “Virtual People” course.
Engage is essentially the driving force behind the VR class. It allows students and teachers to interact with each other in a virtual space.
This is similar to what Meta is trying to achieve with the Metaverse ecosystem. During the summer session, learners and educators have already spent over 60,000 minutes shared in VR environments as part of the Virtual People course.
They are expected to spend approximately 140,000 minutes shared during the fall session of the Virtual People course.
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“In Virtual People, students don’t just try out VR technology every now and then. In fact, virtual reality really becomes the medium on which they rely. To my knowledge, no one has tried to network hundreds of students through VR headsets for months on end in the history of virtual reality, or even in the history of education. It’s VR on a large scale”
~ James Bailenson, Stanford’s communication professor
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In addition, Bailenson has designed the courses in such a way that the students do not suffer from the evil of the simulators.
Thus, each of the lessons was limited to 30-minute sessions. In contrast, to protect the privacy of learners, Bailenson asked Meta-owned Facebook to allow them to use fake accounts when logging into VR classes.
In return, the professor promised to use Oculus’ VR headsets to lead the lessons.
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