 Good afternoon and welcome to another alt session. I'm Julie Vos, head of digital education at City University of London. It's my pleasure to introduce today David Reed from the University of Sheffield who's going to be talking about teaching English in VR, reclaiming a sense of place. Over to you, David. Thank you very much, Julie and good afternoon to everyone. And if you are here today, thank you for staying on right to the end of the of the conference and and attending my session. It is kind of a slightly niche session and is talking really and what I'm going to be talking about is a online course I ran for some Japanese students in virtual reality teaching them English. And I'll report back on the experience of that and what we learned from that. And I titled the talk reclaiming a sense of place. I think because over the last 18 months teaching online, which has been wonderful in some ways. But I think one of the things we've perhaps missed in those 18 months is that sense of being in a shared space with other students. And I think that's something particularly if you teach a very practical subject or course, the ability to get students together to collaborate to practice together. That is lost a little bit in in sort of online delivery, unfortunately. And I think VR was attractive to me, particularly from a language learning perspective, because we do need to sort of practice it, whether VR could could offer that online experience, but also that shared space experience as well. So what I'm going to be talking about today just to give you a brief overview is I'm going to just talk a little bit about the kind of current state of virtual reality is quite a niche technology and and I think it's useful just to have a little bit of background about where we are in terms of commercial availability. Talk a little bit about why place is important in online learning. And then I'll link language learning in virtual reality what what do we know about the research and what does it tell us about what is effective between VR and language learning. And I go into a bit of detail about an online course we ran about six months ago, and talk about the aims of the course and and show you some short clips from it. And then coming out of that I'll talk about what we learn from that course. What our research aims were for that and and what reflections we managed to bring out of that from the students and maybe think about the opportunities and challenges of delivering content and lessons in VR for the future. But for language learning which is my area of expertise but potentially for other subjects as well please add your ideas in the in the chat box. I'd be interested to know how much experience people have with VR to they use VR either on a personal or professional basis where they work, you know any experiences you may have had with that would be really useful to to hear from you. Okay, just to start with with the current state of virtual reality I think it's useful as it is quite a niche technology and it's one of these technologies that keeps threatening to become mainstream but never really seems to. Just a little sort of move backwards about the sort of commercial availability for VR since around 2014. I think, you know, it was only really commercially available for about the last seven or eight years, although it's been around a lot longer. You know, I think going back the first types of VR headsets that were more widely available were things like Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR where you slotted your mobile phone into them. And, you know, these were cheap and available very widely and lots of people had a play with these you know maybe only for a few hours or something. They were completely wireless so it's very easy to demonstrate and use them quite limited in terms of the level of immersion. The quality of the screen was dependent very much on the mobile device so you got very variable experiences. Most people didn't use them for a long time they could make you feel sick quite quickly as well so really only occasionally used for most people. And the experiences were quite limited you could look at sort of 360 pictures and some videos but there was a limit to what you could actually do with these relatively underpowered devices. Now around 2016 we began to see the emergence of more higher powered devices such as the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. And these were very expensive devices looking at several thousand pounds once you include the fact that you needed a computer to connect it to as well. You needed a lot of space there are several accessories that need to be connected to them these various sort of sensors that sense where you were. They weren't wireless you can see in that picture you were connected up to a computer and the controllers were connected to each other. It was a relatively sort of cumbersome setup. But the reason for that was that it was incredibly immersive. There was the quality of the images you were getting in the headset were very high largely because they were coming from the computer rather than the headset. And that meant that they were very popular with gamers and although you could do other things on them as well. But again very much a niche technology especially because of the cost of those devices. Now in the last couple of years we've seen the emergence of these kind of what I consider sort of hybrid devices taking some of the sort of better aspects of those two things. And particularly you've seen this through a company called Oculus and they've released a device called the Oculus Quest. The Oculus Quest 2 in the last couple of years. And these are quite affordable not super affordable but about 300 pounds for the for the base model. They're fully wireless. You don't need to be connected to anything you can take them anywhere. Everything is contained within the headset and the controllers. The level of immersion is certainly much better than those earlier VR headsets I mentioned perhaps not quite as good as the high end ones but very nice experiences and a real feeling that you're in a place or in a situation. And good for both games and experiences. These are essentially quite powerful sort of mobile phone devices contained within that headset. So it's capable of doing quite a lot and you can download lots of different mobile apps. And over the last few years these have become incredibly popular these devices and millions of these have been sold. And the suggestion is that maybe lockdown helped with that. But there's this idea that maybe we're getting to that kind of tipping point for VR. And you know you can download lots of different apps and here are some examples of the kinds of things people can do with them. You know sports you can play sports within within the VR headset. Table tennis you can attend online conferences. You know go to to cinemas or the simulation of a large screen cinema either by yourself or with other people. Fishing fitness is a really big thing in VR. I think a lot of these things became very popular during lockdown simply because many of these these things were not available to people during that time. So you could couldn't go to the gym but you could do your VR fitness. You couldn't go to the cinema but you could feel like you were there watching the big screen. Couldn't necessarily attend conferences in person but you could go to virtual ones as well. And there's also sort of artistic apps you know painting and graffiti and sculpture that you can do in VR as well. It's a very different experience from just doing it in real life. And there have been apps that allow people to learn languages in VR as well. There's one called Mondley where you can engage with that sort of computer characters and practice different languages like Spanish and French. This is the English version but these are very much kind of self study apps. So they're really for students to study by themselves and to learn by themselves. And in that sense they're quite similar to something like Duolingo and many people use that on their mobile devices to learn languages. But it's an asynchronous mode of learning. And I think you know I was interested in whether it was possible to have synchronous lessons and to have that collaborative and interactive element to lessons. So there have been attempts to do this. There have been attempts through various social apps. And in virtual reality there are a lot of social apps where you can go and kind of meet people and you know random people online or friends online in sort of simulated spaces. It's a kind of classic Star Trek or ready player one sort of holodeck idea. And there have been attempts to do language learning within some of these such as VR chat as an app called VR chat. And you can see there's some language, Chinese language lessons going on there. There's another one called Rec Room. I think that's a Chinese language lesson as well. And here's Alt Space which is another thing. And again, if you've had the experience with any of these do let us know in the chat. I think the only difficulty with these, although I've watched videos of these and you know it's very interesting is that they do require quite a technical knowledge to be able to set these up from the teacher's perspective. So it's unlikely these would be more widely used or available to teachers simply because of the technical knowledge needed to do that. These apps were not designed for language learning. So there's a lot of kind of forcing and changing of things to make it suitable. However, I think we became interested in VR and we heard about an app by a company called Amuris who had designed an app specifically for sort of synchronous live lessons in English. And the app was designed specifically for language learning. It wasn't just a general chat app. It was specifically for delivering English language lessons. And for the students, the students are in VR. So they're fully engaged in Amuris in the headset. You can see their hands there and moving through the environment. So they're fully 360 looking around as if they're in the environment or in a location. The teacher is not in VR. The teacher is sat at a computer but is engaging in that same virtual world or virtual space with the students. But they use a slightly different software program and this is designed to have various sort of pedagogical or useful teacher features there. And you can see this is a screenshot from one of our lessons. You can see at the top highlighted with the red is a little button which you can click on and this will bring up different locations that you can go to. So you can go to a restaurant, you can go to a cafe, you can go to a city center, you can go to a shopping center. So you can easily move between different places with the students. On the right, you can see some other tools which allow you to do more effective kind of lesson planning. So you can click on these icons and it will bring up different notes that you've made about your lessons. You can follow your lesson plan more easily. And then on the left here, there are some tools for interacting with the students. So the first button is for gestures if you want to wave at the students or thumbs up or encourage them and various things. You can change your costume if you want to change your uniform or costume depending on the location. If you want to wear a fast food restaurant uniform when you're in the fast food restaurant etc. There are various tools for putting students into groups and muting them from between each other. Timers and lots of things there. You can bring up a whiteboard to write on if you want to write on a whiteboard to bring up any language or any points you want to make. So lots of really useful tools and they're not technically too challenging to use for teachers. We've had teachers look at these and feel that that would be perfectly valid for them to use that. Even those who don't feel that confident with technology. So we're interested in using this with our students or with some students to learn whether VR might be a possible delivery mechanism to sort of, you know, occupy that middle space between a face-to-face lesson and an online lesson and to give us back that sense of place when teaching online. And so we had various questions such as does VR help create a better sense of place in online learning? You know, does learning VR encourage students to speak more freely? Does it reduce nerves and anxiety? Does it help with remembering language like vocabulary better? And does it help them concentrate better than online or face-to-face classes? And I think, you know, we did a bit of research into the, you know, research into place. And I think, you know, the idea of place is quite important in online learning. You know, the idea if we can create online a space where students feel it's a sort of a centralized or familiar place to them that can help to sort of humanize and socialize the online space for them. Otherwise they feel a little bit kind of, you know, dislocated. And it can reduce what we call sort of this transactional distance, that feeling that, you know, you're far away from the person you're communicating with. But if there is a feeling of being in a place, then that can reduce that. From a language learning perspective, you know, the idea of being in a place, role-playing is a very key aspect of language learning. And being able to situate a role-play in a place can really help to improve the fluency of the students. And the ability to transfer language, transfer language from, you know, practicing it in a classroom situation or an artificial situation and be able to take that into the real world. You know, the more that you can situate that within a place, you know, whether it's a real place like a restaurant or something or an office and then it's much easier to transfer that outside of that. And there's been a reasonable amount of research into language learning and VR as well. Some of the positive features just very quickly go over these. Things like, you know, transferring contextualization, as I mentioned, helps with vocabulary recall, engagement and motivation are quite a big aspect. And it does help reduce sort of anxiety in students, probably because you're communicating through an avatar. In terms of sort of research gaps, the novelty factor is an issue whether people just learn more in VR simply because it's a new and innovative. An interesting technology rather than something that, you know, over time, maybe that novelty factor will wear off and the learning gains will reduce as well. And the fact there's, again, maybe because of the newness of the technology, there's perhaps a lack of real world studies in VR. So we ran a pilot course teaching English in VR. And you can see a screenshot there from one of the lessons. And this was a five week, 10 hour course. We had nine Japanese students. Now the focus was on speaking and five of them agreed to take part in the research which involved sort of surveys during the course and then some interviews at the end. I just want to show a very quick video example so you can see what it actually looks like. This was recorded kind of from the teacher's perspective, but you can see what the way that sort of lessons might be engaged. This is in a fast food restaurant. What would you like to order? You can see the teacher is wearing a sort of a uniform of a fast food restaurant. Again, that sort of helps that authenticity. And the teacher and the students can interact with different things. You can see the screen there where you're sort of totalling up the order. Again, it makes it feel a lot more authentic. You can see in the background as well there's a whiteboard there where the teacher has put up some useful language for the students so you can bring in those elements as well. You can see it's a very kind of authentic situation. Now here are some of the questions we were asking in the survey and the questionnaires. And it really just these are some of the questions but I'll just quickly move on to what we heard from the students themselves. So I've tried to group the students responses into sort of themes and we'll get an idea of how they felt about studying in VR. One thing that came up obviously was this idea of place and lots of students mentioned this and it was a recurring theme in their feedback and in the interviews we did with them. You can see some of the comments from them here. A lot of feeling that place was really important, the ability to put yourself in different situations, allowed them to speak English more naturally. It's contextualized and made the speaking more authentic. There's various responses around communication. Students says well you know I feel free to speak and talk English again this idea of being behind an avatar made it much easier for them to communicate. Japanese students are due to educational culture sometimes a bit more reticent to communicate in class, but we didn't find that with the students. Again being able to play a character or play a role was very interesting and not difficult at all. I'll perhaps come to that in a while. It's so comfortable. Yeah, I feel people not looking at me. We all know that feeling of anxiety when trying to learn a language and not having those sort of eyes boring into you can be incredibly relaxing for students. One issue was sometimes to do with visual cues and those two comments that really relate to that. In VR you can't really see people's faces very well, their gestures aren't that accurate. So it's sometimes difficult to know when someone's finished speaking and whether they're reacting positively to what you're saying. And there was a couple of comments there about that. A lot of comments about the gestures a lot really liked being able to do these gestures with the controllers. They use these controllers on the on the Oculus Quest. They can use them to do like thumbs up and various things like that. And they really like the ability to use that to kind of say positive things about their colleagues or teacher. You comment about memory and attention. Really, someone suggested it help them remember things and words. And I think that frustration was also an interesting one because it allowed them to perhaps not be distracted by other things because they're fully immersed in their heads. They often seem as a negative of the headset. It did allow them to fully concentrate, although some felt differently. Some felt that perhaps the rich environment sometimes was more distracting than helpful. So just to sort of sum up in terms of the opportunities of VR learning and learning English and VR incredible opportunities for contextualized and situated learning increased confidence and freedom to speak better transfer and recall of language better peer support and collaboration much easier to do group work and pair work within VR VR situation. So from a teaching perspective, we felt it was easier to offer sort of improvised lessons, change the tone of the lesson if it wasn't going so well. That's much more difficult in online teaching, but in VR we felt it was a lot easier to do that because we had all these different locations at our disposal to be able to kind of change things swiftly if we felt things were working. I think that's that's perhaps different from online learning. There are challenges and things like facial and visual cues which are missing, maybe the novelty wearing off and to a certain degree, creativity limited by the software. And also the need for a much clearer pedagogy of VR delivery is such a new technology, but the way that we deliver lessons the way that we structured tasks is probably going to need to change in the VR space. Okay, I think that's it. If there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them. That's great. Thanks, David. That's very interesting. Someone who's learned a lot of languages. I think it would have been fun to try out a couple of questions from Anna. I'll go to the one about equipment first because that was one I had. So did students have to buy their own equipment or did you send them out? They do. I mean, they need to own and it's very specific. What's called the Oculus Quest or the Oculus Quest 2, it's limited to because it was designed specifically for that headset. These are the most popular, currently the most popular headsets out there. And, you know, people buy them. We weren't asking students to buy them just for these lessons. People tend to buy these headsets for their own purposes for gaming and socializing and things like that. We were just identifying students who already owned these headsets, who wanted to join our class. So when we were seeking students, we asked for students who were already owners of these types of headsets. So those students had the experience of using this VR environment already? Exactly, yes. I mean, obviously we did have to do some sort of training with them with the app, but not, you know, with using VR per se. So the other question from Anna is how time consuming is it to set up the different scenarios? And I guess that probably ties into the question from Jezrene which is about how much control do you have over the background or environment? So I guess is it something that's already created for you or do you set up a lot of it? It is. The company's been pretty good though. They provided a huge number of potential locations that you can go to. You know, there's cafes and restaurants and shops and airplanes and airports and, you know, shopping centres and city centres and lots of things. You can't sort of create your own environments, but they're sort of trying to add more as they go along. And it does allow you to also create your own, if you've got your own 360 images, you can also insert those into some of the locations. So you can put your own images of your city or whatever if you want to look at that as well. So and in terms of setting it up, someone asked about setting it up. It's very easy to set up because you can have these little interactive elements in the location. So you might have little like spinny wheels where they sort of spin the wheel and choose a topic and then discuss it. And really that's just a little, you know, the teacher just to type that into a form and then that pops up on the screen there. There's a question about costs. How much does it cost and paper license? Well, their model is an interesting one really. I think they're doing it on a lesson basis. So for every hour of teaching you do, you have to pay the company immerse $15. And so you can have eight students in a class. So, you know, it depends on how much you charge your students ultimately, I suppose. Let's say you charge them 10 pounds a lesson or 15 pounds a lesson, whatever you're charging, then you have to take $15 off that to give to the company for the, you know, support development of the software. So that's the model that they're using. And as I said, it must be a fun way to teach. You talked a lot about the sort of student feedback. I assume were you the teacher here? Yes, me and my colleague, we both taught here. Honestly, it was some of the most enjoyable teaching we've ever done. I think a lot of the things that the students said applied to us as well. I think that feeling of to a certain degree being sort of hidden behind an avatar was also fun as well. I didn't feel so, you know, looked at instead and, you know, you could sort of play a role as much as the students can as well. And I think maybe I like kind of computer games, maybe it's more interesting because of that. And it feels a bit like a computer game you're sort of moving through rather than a lesson. But, you know, it was just so noticeable that students were really different in that context. They were really expressive. You can see that they were, they didn't feel that kind of anxiety of, you know, students often feel in class, and they're trying to speak a foreign language. All right. Well, thank you very much, David. That's really, really interesting. And I hope you all enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Okay. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye.