Reimagining the Classroom With AI

Will students in the future spend their day wearing Virtual Reality (VR) headsets? If Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg had his way, this may be the reality.

Meta said it is bringing its enterprise-level Quest services to the education sector, the social media giant announced on April 15.

Zuckerberg’s company Meta recently promoted this very idea, and according to a CNN article including an interview with Meta’s president of global affairs, “Meta will launch new software for educators that aims to make it easier to use its VR headsets in the classroom. The tools will let teachers manage and program multiple Quest headsets at once, give them access to a range of education-related apps and provide greater oversight and control of how students are using the devices.”

Meta said there are several educational facilities already employing Quest headsets, including a life sciences course at the University of Glasgow that immerses students inside the human body, a criminal justice course at New Mexico State that places users at a virtual crime scene, and a business class at Stanford University that helps prepare students for interviews.

For young students, VR technology could assist in artistic creativity, exploring molecules up close, or watching a Shakespearean play in the Globe Theatre in, say, the year 1582.

VR can turn learning into an interactive experience. For example, students can take virtual field trips to the moon, historical sites, or deep into the ocean, which makes learning more engaging and memorable.

Subjects like science and geography can benefit from VR by allowing students to visually explore the lifecycle of a plant, the water cycle, or even the structure of the earth’s layers.

University criminal justice students could use VR to investigate virtual crime scenes or collaborate with students and professors in different geographical locations. Medical students can use VR to perform virtual surgeries, and engineering students can explore the mechanics of a machine in a three-dimensional space.

VR simulations can be used to provide practical, hands-on experience in a safe environment. This is useful in disciplines like medicine, chemistry, or physics where real-life training can be risky or expensive.

However, the use of VR in education, while innovative, raises concerns about potential disassociation from reality among students. This phenomenon, often called "reality confusion" or "virtual reality dissociation," involves several intertwined issues.

Students, particularly younger ones, might start blurring the boundaries between real and virtual experiences, which can alter their perception of spatial relationships and interpersonal interactions. This would make it challenging for them to differentiate between what happens in VR and what happens in the real world.

In addition to this problem, the immersive nature of VR can also lead to escapism, where students may actually prefer the virtual world as a refuge from real-life challenges, potentially developing an unhealthy reliance on it for satisfaction and achievement.

This phenomenon already exists today as children and even adults often prefer to play 2D video games than to interact with the real world.

For example, while VR can connect users in virtual spaces, excessive use could potentially isolate them from face-to-face human interactions, affecting their social skills development and leading to social isolation.

To mitigate these risks, if they are to implement the use of such technology, educational institutions need a balanced approach to integrating VR into learning. This includes using VR as a supplement – not a replacement – to traditional teaching methods, setting clear guidelines for its use, and ensuring VR sessions are supervised.

To further reduce any negative or detrimental effects, teachers would also need to engage students in discussions after using VR to reinforce the distinction between the virtual and real world and integrate these experiences with real-world applications.

With all consideration, it seems that the integration of VR into education has more benefits than disadvantages.