Virtual reality (VR) may be heralded as the future of education, but teachers are currently excluded from this ecosystem. When a group of IIT-Kharagpur researchers began working on developing a 360-degree VR educator platform, they had this fundamental problem in mind.
During the pandemic, Bhagat and a team of researchers had the idea to create a no-code 360-degree VR platform for teachers after noticing that online classes lacked interaction.
"What guarantee do you have that a student is actually watching the video and understanding the concept?" he asked, emphasizing how online classes can be lecture-heavy and sometimes repetitive, with no emphasis on creating a collaborative learning environment.
According to Bhagat, virtual reality has the potential to make learning more interactive and immersive by utilizing computer-generated graphics in a three-dimensional environment, which is a better medium for solving complex concepts than simply reading or hearing them.
However, creating content for 360-degree experiences necessitates a significant investment in manpower, high-end workstations, and access to high-end VR headsets that can cost thousands of dollars. Bhagat, who also leads the project, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi, wanted to simplify the process from the start.
It took Bhagat and a team of researchers more than 18 months to create an open-source 360-degree VR platform designed specifically for teachers and educators. The platform's beauty is that it requires no prior coding knowledge, making it simple to create new content, often in less than 30 minutes.
It takes hours to create immersive VR experiences, but 360-degree VR content should be simple to create for teaching purposes," he says. There are no prerequisite skills required for creating VR content. All they need to do is take 360-degree photos, follow the instructions, and they'll have a lesson ready to experience in VR. To make the lesson more interesting, teachers can incorporate audio, quizzes, and gamification elements.
The platform is intended for Android, but it can also be used on a desktop computer. Students can visualize concepts taught in school thanks to the increasing penetration of smartphones in remote areas of the country and the availability of low-cost mobile VR headsets such as the Google Cardboard. "The degree of immersion varies depending on which VR headset you use, but the goal has always been to make VR accessible so that a student from rural India can experience VR firsthand."
Bhagat recently taught a two-day workshop at the Regional Institute of Education in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, to school teachers about creating immersive educational content with the 360 VR educator platform. Previously, similar workshops were held in Cuttack and Malaysia. The National Council of Educational Research and Training has already endorsed the 360 VR Educator (NCERT).
Bhagat and his team's next goal is to expand the 360 VR Educator platform beyond India. Because the project is funded by the COL, which has 54 member countries, the platform has the potential to empower teachers and provide them with a new way to bridge the gap between theory and practise through the use of virtual reality.
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