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‘Herding Blind Cats’: How Do You Lead a Class Full of Students Wearing VR Headsets?

Agriculture professors like to take students on “crop walks” to teach them how to spot certain plant diseases, but it’s an activity that can only be done during the right season. So when Melanie Miller-Foster, an agriculture professor at Pennsylvania State University, started thinking about using 360-degree VR headsets in her class, she decided to try to simulate crop walks year-round.

Then she realized one challenge of the technology: In a 360-degree video, the professor who recorded the footage can’t control where in the scene students will look at any given time. The view changes as the viewer turns their head. “We have this thing over here that we want everyone to see,” Miller-Foster says, “so how do we make sure everyone sees it?”

They soon realized, though, that this feature of the technology could be a benefit. Forcing the student to find the right part of the image makes the educational experience more interactive than passively watching. They added text instructions to the footage so that when students look down, they see directions for what they need to find next, or clues to guide them as the scene changes.

Originally published in EdSurge