In the fall of 2018, I began testing a virtual reality system in my 9th-grade world history classroom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s University Laboratory High School. The objective was to develop projects that were both student centered and digitally inflected. It was essential that students have a large degree of autonomy and agency in the development and execution of the digital project (Rogers and Freiberg 1994). Ultimately, I created two assignments that encouraged student creation while bringing together primary source analysis and the immersive medium of virtual reality. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on an assignment where the students used primary sources as the essential texts in the development of a tour of a historic space in Google Earth VR with an HTC VIVE virtual reality system. Using this application and system created a unique set of opportunities and challenges in how we understand and process historical texts. I found that virtual reality facilitated student engagement with the primary sources and allowed for the examination of historical spaces from new perspectives. Placing locations from a historical text on a modern map helped students think about change over time while granting them the ability to explore a map or space in a novel way. In addition, the assignment allowed the students to move beyond the two dimensions of a map or the limited interactivity of a video to create and present information in a uniquely immersive environment. Despite the assignment suffering from some challenging accessibility and collaboration limitations, the students ultimately enjoyed the project and appreciated the opportunity to learn about history while using a new classroom technology.
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As a classroom tool, the potential for virtual reality is substantial (Thompson 2018). Both low-end (Google Earth VR) and high-end (HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift) systems allow students to experience media with an unprecedented level of immersion. In comparison to traditional fixed-media, students can explore space in 360 degrees and engage content with a greater level of agency since they are less limited by the viewpoint of the camera. They can take in peripheral details and examine things that might otherwise fall outside the observer’s perspective. They can also visit places that would be too difficult or expensive to travel to. This is particularly useful when teaching world history and addressing topics connected to how humans have historically used space.
With the potential of the VR system and the application in mind, I went about creating a student-centered assignment that would facilitate student agency and autonomy. Although the medium of virtual reality already granted the students a comparatively significant amount of freedom in exploring a space, Google Earth VR does not necessarily encourage student creation. This led me to the idea of using virtual reality as a tool in the development and presentation of a historical tour. Because Google Earth VR has a number of spiritually significant locations fully rendered in 3D, I decided to make this assignment the capstone project of our unit on religion and philosophy.
Over the course of six weeks, the students and I explored a series of texts (primary and secondary sources) through class discussion that highlighted the central beliefs of various world religions and philosophies. With these texts in mind, I envisioned my students creating a virtual tour in which they guided their peers through the narrow streets of Jerusalem or along the treacherous path to the top of China’s sacred Mount Emei. After engaging with these foundational texts, the students then began a three-week period of research and development. For the unit’s capstone project, I curated a list of primary and secondary sources specifically for the project and asked the students to choose a topic based on the available texts. However, I also encouraged the students to think of additional locations and develop their own source lists if they were interested in a topic not represented. Ultimately, the students chose to research a wide variety of sites, including a pilgrim’s guide of the Chār Dhām, Ibn Battuta’s account of the Hajj, a travel guide to Renaissance Rome, and an archeological map of Teotihuacán (Venkatraman 1988; Gibb 2010; Gardiner and Nichols 1986; Millon 1973).
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I then encouraged the students to create an itinerary of important locations that provided the relevant historical context. Students consulted secondary sources while keeping in mind a series of questions: What characteristics make/made these locations so meaningful to adherents? What insights do the texts provide that could not be gained from observing the space in VR? What characteristics of the structures, buildings, or natural features provide insights into the worldview being studied? The itinerary would operate as the script for the tour and be where the students cited their sources. I did not place a page limit on the itinerary; however, I suggested that the tour should be no longer than 35 minutes since we have 45-minute periods. Once they completed their itineraries, the students began practicing with the virtual reality system, learning how to manipulate the controllers and mapping their locations. Finally, the students then spent a few weeks giving their tours as groups. Each group consisted of four members, and the students alternated between the role of guide and operator. The guide would present the information from the itinerary while the operator helped their classmates view locations in VR. This ensured that each student had the opportunity to present and, more importantly for the students, spend time in virtual reality.
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The students wrapped up the project with a critical reflection of their own work, their group’s dynamics, and the project as a whole. Overall, the students reported generally positive impressions of the project. When surveyed about their experience, the students commented that using VR helped them better conceptualize, in terms of scale and proximity, the locations that they toured as both a guide and an observer. Multiple students reported being better able to “visualize” the location that they guided their classmates or were guided through. In their survey responses, they expressed an improved ability to “visualize the important architectural aspects of various historical buildings,” develop “a better geographical understanding of what places looked like and how they look now,” and experience “certain ancient locations which otherwise could only be described by models or drawings.” The student feedback demonstrates a clear form of “lived learning” comparable to field trips and other types of experiential learning (Coughlin 2010). Although it cannot replace the experience of a field trip, using virtual reality may provide opportunities to experience locations that would otherwise be inaccessible to most students.
Despite the expressed student excitement about using a state-of-the-art VR system, there are some significant limitations to the use of virtual reality in the classroom. Some students voiced frustrations in their end-of-project reflections about learning to operate the controls while others experienced some minor motion sickness, which is not uncommon with VR. Perhaps, the largest limitation for using virtual reality is accessibility. The expense of purchasing a virtual reality-capable PC and a VR system would likely be cost prohibitive for many teachers. However, the project could be modified to be significantly less costly by integrating Google Cardboard headsets and the Google Tour Creator application. This would limit some of the immersive experience but still capture a significant portion of the experiential qualities that students found so appealing.
Overall, the project highlighted the pedagogical potential for virtual reality and other immersive technologies in the history classroom. Moving towards a more interactive mode of engagement allowed my students to analyze and synthesize sources in new and exciting ways. Despite its accessibility limitations, virtual reality allows students to engage in forms of “lived learning” that they might otherwise not be able to access. However, it is important to maintain an emphasis on the hard work of the historian and not become overly reliant on any new technology. When paired with traditional pedagogical practices, like primary source analysis, immersive technologies can be a useful educational tool. As virtual reality systems and the hardware required to run them become more affordable, virtual reality will likely become more ubiquitous in the classrooms.