River Hill, Talon Martin, Pavel Peeve, Paul White
August 2022
[Capstone presentation of Talon and Paul: Slides]
C. Leonie(*), R. Angotti, and K. Sung, “CourseExpo: An Immersive Collaborative Learning Ecosystem,” in ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2022), Tsukuba, Japan, Nov 2022. Available: Full Paper | Poster.
The problems at hand are what might a digital classroom look like and how users would interact in such a classroom. My team was tasked with improving and expanding the functionality that had been previously explored by my predecessors. The existing framework [developed in Spring 2022] consisted of a digital expo hall with individual booths as lessons, some of these booths were designed to support assignments and quizzes. Communication within this digital expo hall was handled through text chat and announcements made by the Teacher user. We deemed that current existing functionality lacked a level of collaboration that we felt was necessary in a classroom environment and decided to improve upon the collaboration aspect of the system.
To accomplish immersion, we implemented spatial voice chat where participants can carry out conversations with selective members based on physical proximity. To accomplish engagement, we experimented with expanding virtual avatar customization. To accomplish collaboration, we supported group quiz taking and designed drawing canvas tables for teachers and students. Our solutions were evaluated by our team along with UWB faculty as clients. Our intent behind each of these solutions was derived from the needs of teachers and students in an educational setting – we were constantly evaluating and exploring this throughout our development.
The project workflow consisted of agile software development in a small team. Our team worked throughout the week as developers and testers of new features that were proposed by us or by the faculty advisor. We held meetings twice a week where we presented our progress and proposed the next work to be completed. Care was taken to outline goals in advance through the creation of user stories and milestones to which we were held accountable. Our goals as a team were to expand upon the strengths of CourseXpo while addressing the aforementioned problems with virtual learning spaces.
The current prototype demonstrates interactions that users may have within a virtual learning environment. These interactions let us create new user stories and explore additional functionality that can be improved upon. As such, the current prototype has identified issues that would likely prevent it from being used in a class setting, such as how an instructor would upload a custom lesson plan. The current implementation does not allow an instructor to custom tailor a lesson plan but currently requires the lesson plan to fit a rigid outline. As such it is difficult to incorporate new lessons without having to modify the existing expo to accommodate a new lesson plan. We believe that the prototype has demonstrated the potential baseline functionalities and interactions within a virtual learning environment. The next steps would be to improve booth creation at runtime from a teacher created lesson, to identify and define membership roles such as teacher and student, and to continue to improve the virtual reality experience for the end user.