Global Excellence Seminar on The Role of Virtual Reality in Education and Training

The future of education is not textbooks and paper and pencil exercises, but immersive gamified experiences that are fun, challenging, and relevant to young people's daily lives. Immersive virtual reality (VR) is predicted to create a paradigm shift in several fields, including education (e.g. Belini et al., 2016; Blascovich & Bailenson, 2011; Greenlight & Roadtovr, 2016), and large investments by leading companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung means that the emerging technology is being used for many applications, including learning, although there is little empirical evidence of its value. In this presentation I will briefly describe my research related to the field of learning with VR and primarily focus upon two studies that are in progress. The first is a recently submitted manuscript which has the objective of determining the consequences of adding immersive VR to virtual learning simulations. In this study, we investigated if immersive VR lead to more learning, and whether the principles of multimedia learning from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML; Mayer, 2009) generalize to immersive VR. Furthermore, electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to obtain a direct measure of cognitive processing during learning. A second work in progress investigated the mechanisms underlying the spatial contiguity effect (students learn better when text and pictures are presented close to each other) in multimedia learning based upon subjective (self-report) and objective (eye tracking, EEG) measures of cognitive load. Results and future research perspectives will be discussed.