Reflection 3 - Virtual Reality

I enjoy helping others learn and have a passion to empowered others. When I became a Microsoft Certified Trainer, one of my first experiences with virtual reality was at the North American Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) Summit. The North American MCT Summit was an event where all the Microsoft trainers gathered to train the trainer, teach others or share how to be effective instructors. Microsoft always has vendors and internal staff to come in and demonstrate some of the emerging technology to help enhance our knowledge base. That year's hot topics at the Summit were virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), gaming, and cloud platforms. I was excited because I had been a previous speaker before training other MCTs to captivate their audience when presenting. It is essential for those who are instructing to be equipped with the soft skillsets or help develop them.

My experience at this MCT summit was with virtual reality. A speaker wanted to demonstrate one of their products in the presentation skills sessions. The product was the "Virtual Speech" in a mobile app version. I downloaded a trial version of the Virtual Speech app and selected a VR headset to wear, which was the Samsung Gear VR Oculus version. The guest speaker asked us to give feedback via a web link on the experience and whether the product was easy to use. We had minimal training and a product overview then it was like testing the VR product. Despite the minimal training, the product seemed easy to use, the graphics were great in appearance, and the information seemed straightforward to digest. He may have been more of a sales guy because there was no problem feeding us minimal information, so our cognitive load balancing was not an issue. It was why I did not take more interest afterward, even though virtual reality is currently a mainstay in advancing technology.

After reflecting on the survey questions, it was unclear what learning outcomes they were trying to achieve at that time. I am sure their learning outcomes have been refined over the years because you want to design an educational product based on cognitive theory or concepts on how people learn (Clark & Mayer, 2016). The exciting revelation about teaching virtual reality is understanding how to align the instructional content in chunks or micro-learning. Chunking will allow the learner to have time to balance the cognitive load, free up working memory and allow the student to learn (Clark & Mayer, 2016, p. 41). In the Virtual Speech app, it seems I rushed through some of the course content, and maybe time was a constraint in the demo experience. When designing multimedia in the instructional design, many considerations must allow the student to learn in his or her cognitive process (Mutlu-Bayraktar et al., 2019).

It has been a long time since the MCT Summit, but the eye contact module stood out in my experience. As I was exploring the eye contact, I was unsure if I was consistent with focusing on the audience, and I sometimes flick my eyes a lot when I get a blind spot or intense light in my path. The experiment was great because it got you comfortable with the audience and how to move around. They have a scoring report on specific components of the eye contact module to let you know how well you make eye contact with the audience. It would be great if they had a formative assessment to ask you specific qualitative questions in real-time to obtain in-depth feedback on the experience while immersed. One of the great attractions of VR is engagement to learn. The graphics are very dynamic and appealing, and the immersive instructional content gives you simulated real-time in VR. Visuals make a difference in your instructional content and can motivate, engage, and draw participation in learning (Clark & Mayer, 2016).

References:

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-Learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

Mutlu-Bayraktar, D., Cosgun, V., & Altan, T. (2019). Cognitive load in multimedia learning environments: A systematic review. Computers & Education, 141, 103618.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103618