Do This, Not That: Digitally Twinned Environments
You CAN recreate your classroom online, but SHOULD you?
First, let me start by saying that I am not talking about the useful sort of digital twinning, such as the exciting possibilities related to increased quality in patient care, or in manufacturing.
No. What I am talking about is the practice of recreating environments, such as classrooms, labs, or campuses for academic purposes (using it for recruitment does show promise, but that will be the topic of a future post. Someday!).
If you’ve spent any time online looking into game-based learning or eXtended Reality programs, you will have been absolutely inundated with hopeful journalism and high-priced programs that promise to completely recreate your campus or classroom. The engagement that will result will be magical. Life altering, even.
Those messages are like cobwebs on a hiking trail; you can’t get anywhere without them smacking you in the face. So, if you are anything like me, you bring along someone else to lead you down the trail. (In case that wasn’t clear, what I am saying is I did the hard work of being smacked with the yucky, icky cobwebs lurking along the proverbial digital twinning trail. You are quite welcome.)
There isn’t a lot of research that directly studies digital twinning of learning environments. According to Lorelle VanFossen (Educators in VR) there are some studies currently in the works, but what I can say from ancillary research, lots of observation, years of experience in teaching and learning, plus common sense is this:
While digitally recreating an environment does have a very limited window of increasing student interest, it does not impact learning outcomes.
This leads to a big letdown for a lot of teachers and institutions. If you have ever handed a child an expensive toy, just to see them abandon it a few minutes later to play with something out of the recycling bin, you have a sense of the letdown you might feel.
Digitally twinned environments in an academic setting very quickly lose their power to engage because they often break the most basic requirements of effective VR: they have no clear goal and are not immersive or highly interactive.
Merchant et al. (2014) found an improvement in student learning outcomes in the case of well-designed games and simulations. However, virtual worlds, which are generally sandbox situations similar to twinned academic labs, can actually decrease students’ learning outcome gains when improperly utilized and assessed.
The reason for this is simple. If there is no good reason to be doing something that introduces a technology barrier to the mix, then that barrier is only going to decrease student performance.
Non-interactive twinned environments can be effectively used as portals to effective learning experiences (i.e. a room that leads to multiple simulations with a clear purpose), but on their own they do not improve student learning.
Do This
In an academic context, there must be a reason an environment or data has been twinned and an immersive reason to interact with that digital twin or it will not improve student learning outcomes.
Think of it like this. Just placing a big group of strangers in a fancy looking room won’t make them any more likely to work together as a team, get to know each other, conquer any common problems, or learn anything new. They need goals and a clear focus for that, and in the case of a digital recreation, they also need to feel immersed.
Immersion is not a byproduct of simply using a VR headset.
The technology can help immersion by occluding vision of the outside world and/or being combined with auditory obscuring through noise-canceling headphones, but the content and programming within the headset can either spark immersion or be a barrier to it.
In a VR setting, if something looks interactive, it must be interactive or it violates user expectations and breaks immersion. That means all these fancy 3D scanning-based environments that look a whole lot like a classroom or campus but can’t actually be interacted with are a waste of your time and resources.
Do This Summary
At the minimum, ensure your VR program:
Has clear goals that are completed using that program
Allows a user to modify the environment
Includes realistic dynamic interactions with the environment
If you can’t do that with VR? Well, then use another medium that isn’t as expensive, uncomfortable to use, or has inherent accessibility concerns.