VR4study: Learning perspectivity with avatars

Cooperation project with the Department of English Philology (Dr Frauke Reitemeier) and the Department of German Philology (Prof. Dr Jörg Wesche)

The Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture is funding the development of the teaching units as part of the Hochschulpakt 2020 project "Innovation plus (2022/23)

Contact: Prof. Dr. Martin Langner and Deborah Ehlers, MA

The epistemological insight of perspectivism, which is fundamental in very many courses of study at the Faculty of Humanities, is to be practised and deepened through the use of virtual reality technologies. To this end, avatars, virtual rooms and re-usable learning scenarios will be created together with students and made available as samples for further learning units.

Students of humanities subjects find it difficult, especially at the beginning of their studies, to perceive reality as constructed and to understand that reality depends on the perspective of the reader and viewer. Accordingly, they find it difficult to relate this insight to themselves or third parties or to transfer it to other situations. The analysis of texts of different media conditions and their integration into historical concepts and systematic questions is therefore very difficult for them.
This deficit is to be countered with VR4study in that
1. developing and providing at least two example scenarios (Macbeth and Faust) together with the students as discursive and performative learning units, as well as
2. on this basis, teachers and students are given the opportunity to produce further learning units themselves relatively easily in the future.
This is connected to the goal of offering students more autonomy in learning and a stronger personalisation of the learning experience. We are therefore aiming at learning environments as a kind of 'visualisation machine', which, like a construction kit, has various tools and sets with which one can assemble rooms and avatars for role plays. They are used in three facets:
a) Avatars as interlocutors and teachers in the role of an assistant director.
b) Scenic interpretation of literary works
c) Reconstruction of historical spaces
The example units are intended to show how central categories of reflection and analytical skills can be taught in relation to the medial specifics of literature. In the courses accompanying the project, skills in New Literacies, visual competence and media competence are practised and combined with a critical-analytical examination. In this way, reflective competence is also increased with regard to knowledge transfer and extracurricular knowledge transfer from a subject-specific and didactic perspective.

The transfer of knowledge content is personalised in three ways in this project. On the one hand, the teaching avatar gives it a clear author, from whose perspective the content is conveyed. This perspective of the speaker becomes much more comprehensible to the student than when reading the source texts and commentaries. Secondly, the students themselves are part of the virtually created reality. Their actions and interactions determine the reactions of the avatars to a certain extent, so that the students actively participate in their learning progress in a largely stress-free way. They do this asynchronously and at their own pace. Thirdly, the avatars' actions are created by students themselves within the framework of a course. This means that each learning unit focuses on the interests of the students. All three levels are additionally thematised by a question-asking narrator-moderator avatar, so that students are encouraged to reflect on this triple perspectivity.
At the same time, the necessary simulation and virtual reality methods are among the basic technologies of the Digital Humanities, which will also be taught in this project. For this purpose, the Institute for Digital Humanities will use its own funds to set up a VR Lab in which students will have access to various head-mounted displays and enough space for interaction to be able to discuss, evaluate and further develop the results at all stages of development. However, the components and example scenarios to be created in the project can also be used in other places and will be made available for subsequent use in the Lower Saxony OER Portal (Twillo) after the project ends.

The data from the VR learning system to be developed offers the possibility to measure the success of the learning scenarios, because a large amount of usable findings about the success of the application accrue as paradata, which can be measured and discussed on the basis of a catalogue of criteria to be created. In this way, the students' growth in competence as well as the success of the units can be evaluated. The students also receive feedback on their learning progress within the course.