Immersive Teaching and Learning Environments

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My research program will examine novel opportunities for advancing immersive technologies to elevate remote teaching and learning experiences for post-secondary students and reduce barriers to education. Leveraging virtual reality (VR) technology for remote teaching and learning has far-reaching impacts. Lack of accessibility in the current education system can become a barrier for students in diverse socioeconomic backgrounds (e.g. remote communities in Canada). Remote learning can bridge these barriers and VR technology is well suited for providing an immersive remote learning experience. Current remote learning is often limited to a computer screen and video conferencing. Its experience remains far from what students encounter in the physical classroom. Existing VR technology for education is still developing and suffers from several limitations including the lack of accessible immersive collaborations, effective personalization of hands-on learning content, and consistent motivating stimulus for learning. My team will address these challenges focusing on three themes: Theme 1: Immersive Virtual School: My team will design and implement a scalable and accessible virtual school platform where students will be able to fully interact with each other and the instructor in VR, while having their bodies represented as virtual avatars. We will examine accessible user interfaces for spatial movement and for collaboration that accommodate students with different abilities to access technology. Theme 2: Immersive Personalized Learning: My team will conceptualize and implement novel methodologies for VR content creation that provide students with hands-on learning experiences according to the desired subject area. We will develop user modeling techniques to support personalized learning experiences using eye-tracking technology. Theme 3: Immersive Gamification: My team will research and evaluate gaming elements in the immersive virtual school, and focus on how gamification techniques can be utilized to increase students' intrinsic motivation and engagement in immersive learning environments and their effects on student learning outcomes. My research program's overarching goal is to advance immersive technologies, adapting them to serve as our society's future virtual learning spaces. In order to facilitate this vision, my HQP and I will contribute to the design and implementation of a suite of immersive interfaces, techniques and methodologies that would allow for the accommodation of different student needs, adaptive personalization of the virtual environments, and intrinsically-motivated gamification of student learning. This proposed program will help provide technological insight on future learning technology and future learning environments, elevate immersive learning experiences for students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, and ultimately reduce barriers of remote education, especially in the post COVID-19 pandemic era.