Facilitating and evaluating the use of virtual reality tutorials within the school of Life, Health and Chemical Sciences

Project leader(s): Lucy AndersonJanette WallaceSarah DaniellTrevor Collins
Theme: Technologies for STEM learning
Faculty: STEM
Status: Current
Dates: May 2025 to October 2027

This proposal seeks to improve student engagement and skills development (specifically, collaboration and communication skills) through the introduction and evaluation of web-based virtual reality (VR) tutorials within the School of Life, Health and Chemical Sciences (LHCS).

The project will develop tutoring strategies and produce guidance and support for module teams introducing VR tutorials as part of their student support strategy. The project team will also design and implement a standardised form of evaluation to gather feedback from staff and students. It will thereby contribute to the uptake, and evidence the impact, of VR tutorials within LHCS and produce a set of tried-and-tested templates to facilitate adoption in other schools.

This work builds on two projects: the ‘Exploring the impact of virtual reality on engagement and accessibility of tutorials for students studying S296’ project (supported by eSTEeM) and a follow-up project to support and evaluate Associate Lecturer (AL) led VR tutorials on SD329 (supported by LHCS BoS Group). Students who participated in the first project, using the Mozilla Hubs platform, were overwhelmingly in favour of the further introduction of VR to supplement standard tuition and valued VR as a platform for learning and connecting with their tutor and peers in a less formal way. The second (ongoing) study introduced a series of six tutorials on SD329 ‘Signals and perception: the science of the senses’ hosted in the FrameVR platform.

These tutorials have been planned and led by ALs teaching SD329 (with the support of the project team). SD329 has challenging content on the biology underpinning the senses and was an ideal module to potentially benefit from discussing 3D models.

The previous studies highlighted the benefits of being able to communicate freely and in a more relaxed manner than is routinely achieved in Adobe Connect, which has wider application to other modules.