Students' Attitudes Towards Educational Virtual Environments

Students' attitudes towards educationalvirtual environments

TASSOS A. MIKROPOULOS

Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina, Ioannina GR-45110,Greece.E-mail: [email protected]

ANTHIMOS CHALKIDIS

Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina, Ioannina GR-45110,Greece.

APOSTOLOS KATSIKIS


ANASTASSIOS EMVALOTIS


This case study reports on an investigation of the attitude of education studentstowards virtual reality (VR) as a tool in the educational process, and towards vir-tual learning environments on speci®c disciplines. Our results indicate a favour-able attitude towards VR in the educational process. Although immersion was notsupported in this study, half of the students declared immersion experiences. Stu-dents consider the mouse the most effective input device for navigation in virtualenvironments, with a joystick the second one. Because the sampling population issmall, the qualitative results must be regarded as tentative. There is, however, aneed for further investigation, which is currently being undertaken by our group.

KEYWORDS: Higher education; attitudes; case studies; computer assistedinstruction (CAI); human computer interface (HCI); virtual reality.

INTRODUCTION

Virtual reality (VR) is a highly interactive computer-based environment, where theuser participates in a `virtually real' world through multiple sensorial channels.

Education and Information Technologies 3 137±148 (1998)

1360±2357 # 1998 IFIP, published by Chapman & Hall Ltd

Freedom in navigation (exploratory VR) and interaction (interactive VR) is essentialfor a computer environment to be characterized as a VR environment (virtual envir-onment, VE). A virtual environment designed to educate and=or inform the user iscalled a virtual learning environment (Taylor, 1994). A VE should have an educa-tional objective and provide users with experiences they would otherwise not beable to experience in the physical world.

Research on virtual reality suggests that it could be a powerful tool for education(Pantelidis, 1993; Winn, 1993) based on its main characteristics. These are the ®rst-person user viewpoint and free navigation, as well as the ability to manipulate thevirtual environment in real time. Although Winn (1993) proposes immersion as thekey point of VR for educational use, we believe that its two main characteristics sta-ted in the previous paragraph are enough for VR to become a powerful educationaltool. Winn concludes that constructivism is the best basis for building a theory oflearning in virtual environments. We start from a more general aspect, that of sen-sory ergonomics (Waterworth, 1995), claiming that computer systems function pri-marily as sensory transducers and experience enhancers and not as cognitiveartifacts. We consider that we cannot help students to think better, but we can al-low them to experience more, exploiting new technologies such as virtual realitysystems. Information as presented in VR is compatible with the different learningstyles of students, and the different ways that people take in information and think.This comes from the exploratory character of the virtual worlds with complete free-dom in navigation using ®rst-person user viewpoint. This is the approach of openlearning environments and especially empty technologies (Winn, 1993) that doesnot occur in other educational technologies such as multimedia.

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of the study described in this paper is to investigate the attitudes ofeducation students towards virtual reality as a tool in the educational procedure,and towards virtual learning environments in speci®c disciplines.

As VR is a new technology, its use as an educational tool is quite recent with few re-ports on empirical research. Some articles on VR in speci®c disciplines have ap-peared and started to be evaluated on Newtonian mechanics (Dede et al., 1994) andenvironmental education (Mikropoulos et al., 1997). There are some empirical re-search papers on the attitudes of users towards VR in education. Merickel (1993) re-ports on the relationship between VR and the ability of elementary school childrento create, manipulate and utilize mental images for spatially related problem solvingusing an immersive VR system. Although children had some dif®culties in using theperipheral devices, they had become quite pro®cient in the system by the end ofthe study. Byrne and Furness III (1994) conducted a study where 69 students, agednine to 16, created and visited virtual worlds in a fully immersive VR system. Theyreport that students performed well in using VR and enjoyed their experiences.They also note few signi®cant differences in terms of race or gender, and that VRhas a de®nite role in education from a merely motivational viewpoint. Concerningthe factor of age, Osberg (1995) reports on the age of users experiencing virtual

138 Mikropoulos et al.

worlds, ®nding that as students get older (ages 16±18), they enjoy their experi-ences, but slightly less than younger students. Schaefer and Wassermann (1995)give preliminary results on adult students' reactions to low-cost VR. They show thatall their demonstrated virtual environments were understood by the users at an in-tuitive level, with some negative observations on the navigating devices and head-sets used. Talkmitt's (1996) results show a general positive attitude of 94 studentsaged 14±15. Grove (1996) emphasizes the importance of collaboration for learningin VR. He reports that most of his young classroom children enjoyed their experi-ence of VR, pointing out that VR is useful but not because it looks more like reality.

Most of the above research has a cognitive approach, and concludes that VR ishighly promising as a learning and teaching tool, and should be explored further.The axes of our research are:

· To investigate the quality of VR applications in education. Our aim is to analysecritically the attitude and feedback concerning the design and integration of vir-tual learning environments.

· To investigate the man±machine interaction concerning different navigationdevices.

The hypotheses are:

· There is a positive acceptance of VR in the educational process.· Students prefer the joystick as the most effective peripheral device for naviga-

tion in virtual environments.

METHOD

The research was undertaken during the academic year 1995 to 1996. The sampleconsisted of 20 students from the Department of Primary Education, University ofIoannina, future teachers in primary schools. Sixteen of the participants were fe-males, in common with all education departments in Greece and elsewhere. The ageof these students was 18±26 years old with 70% being 21 years old. All the studentshad prior computer use experience. The present research is part of a more generalexamination of virtual realities in environmental education.

Participation in the project was voluntary, out of the scope of any course, with noextra credits. An initial questionnaire was given to the students, concerning demo-graphic data, previous experience in information technologies, type of computeruse (kind of applications, peripheral devices), and level and source of informationabout VR. Students read some notes on what VR is and how to navigate in virtualworlds using the different peripheral devices. After that, they visited two virtualworlds.

The ®rst one was familiar to the subjects from their everyday lives, a well furnishedof®ce (Fig. 1). We have modi®ed the interior of a ready-made virtual of®ce for thepurposes of our research. Students were guided by notes and exercises on how tonavigate and what to do during their exploration. They had to enter the of®ce, navi-

Educational virtual environments 139

gate all around, locate and approach the bookshelf and open one of its drawers.They had to locate the desk and use the calculator, and ®nally to navigate and inter-act with objects such as lights, pencils, chairs and telephones.

The second virtual world was designed and developed by our research group. Wehave developed the project LAKE (virtuaL Approach to the Kernel of Eutrophica-tion) for research concerning the use of virtual environments in environmental edu-cation (Mikropoulos et al., 1997). A series of interconnected virtual worlds relatedto the phenomenon of eutrophication in lakes has been designed and developed forinvestigation of the effectiveness of virtual learning environments (Fig. 2). Becauseof the complexity of the phenomenon and the variety of parameters involved to-gether with their relations, the didactic approach is not simple. The virtual environ-ments give a qualitative representation of the phenomenon, spotlighting the basicrelated factors and their relations. In this ®rst approach, the virtual worlds are ex-ploratory, with the ®nal plan for them to become fully interactive. Students may na-vigate freely outside or inside the lake, watch objects and facts (swimming three-dimensional ®sh, dead ®sh, oxygen, phytoplankton, ¯ora, salts), and investigate the

Figure 1. A view of the virtual of®ce

Figure 2. An inner view of one of the virtual lakes


process and the results of eutrophication. Students may also choose one of 15 pre-set viewpoints, to begin their navigation from a different starting point.

The systems used were desktop VR systems with the SUPERSCAPE VRT softwareproviding a `window on the world' for the virtual representations. Although the sys-tem design supported immersion and exotic peripherals, we used a standard perso-nal computer, affordable and existing in almost every school's computer lab-oratory. The peripherals for navigation were the keyboard, the mouse, a joystick, aspaceball and a space mouse. The two last ones are specially designed for navi-gation in three-dimensional environments. Students had some instructions on howto navigate in three-dimensional space using these peripherals, and on the activitiesthey had to do. They had one hour to interact with each virtual world, but the actualduration of their exploration was from 30 to 45 min for each virtual world. After that,students ®lled closed and open questionnaires concerning their experiences, and adiscussion followed.

RESULTS

General

Table 1 shows examples of students' previous computer use experiences.

Concerning the peripheral input device used, most of the students are familiar withmouse or joystick use. This is because of the disk operating system (DOS)=windowsapplications and games they were experienced with. The high percentage of experi-ence in Logo programming (85%) is because of two existing courses in Logo lan-guage at our department. Only two of the subjects had some experience ofmultimedia=hypermedia, multiple representations and information linking. Con-cerning the level of information about VR, 60% of the students had no previous in-formation, the rest of them having a low level of information mainly from massmedia.

Table 2 shows the attitude of the sample towards information technologies (IT).From the ®rst three questions, it is clearly shown that all the students have a posi-tive attitude to the use of IT in the classroom. In spite of this, 25% say that IT gener-ates technical problems in classroom use, and 40% feel uncomfortable with usingIT. Concerning the in¯uence of IT on the natural self-expression of students, opi-nions are diffused.

Table 1. Students' previous computer use experiences(N � 20)

Kind of computer experience Number %

Games 9 45Of®ce automation 12 60Multimedia applications 2 10Logo programming 17 85


Virtual environments

Following subjects' experiences with the virtual of®ce, we have recorded their atti-tudes (Table 3). Table 4 shows the students' expressions from a more objective ap-proach. It is obvious that there are students expressing themselves in more thanone category appearing in the table. Ten of the students declare enthusiasm and=orimpressiveness. Our ®rst estimation of attitude is conservative as only three of thestudents (Table 3) express enthusiasm. However, combining these three with theothers declaring novelty of the medium, we have a positive attitude from more thanhalf of the subjects. These feelings of enthusiasm and impressiveness are key pointsfor the activation of the cognitive process through enquiry and search. So, it isworthwhile investigating how a medium provoking such feelings in the educationalprocess can be properly exploited.

The ease of learning using VEs seems to be ambiguous. Five of the students con-sider that the use of VEs is easy and simple, and ®ve others consider that there isthe need for training. Even this small number puts some thoughts about the exis-tence of a familiarization stage. This has to do both with navigating peripheral de-vices, and with complete freedom of navigation that virtual environments give. Twoof the students had a more critical attitude. One of them does not wish such an ex-perience with virtual worlds that is not relevant to the educational process, such as

Table 2. Students' attitudes towards information technologies (N � 20)

AgreeAgree withconditions

Disagree withconditions Disagree No answer

Computers are a luxury forschools at any level

0 0 8 12 0

I would be glad seeing mystudents using computers

12 6 1 1 0

Using ITs, educator improvesteaching quality

10 10 0 0 0

The use of IT in the educationalprocess generates technicalproblems

1 4 10 4 1

I feel uncomfortable thinking ofme using computers in theclassroom

4 4 4 8 0

Computers cramp natural self-expression of students

0 7 7 1 5

Table 3. Attitude characterization of the 20 students after experiencing virtual of®ce

Attitude characterization Keen Positive Cautious Negative

Number of students 3 14 3 0


an of®ce. The other student has a negative attitude towards media in education asexperience enhancers, although he enjoys exploring the virtual worlds.

It was surprising that half of the students declared that they had immersion experi-ences. Students' expressions are:

. . . I was feeling like to be there, . . . there are feelings like in the real world, . . . it is likenot to have a body, . . . I was gradually immersed in the world, . . . I had the feeling that Iwas moving in the real world, . . . I had the feeling that my skills were expanding, . . . it isa simulation just like in the real world (twice), . . . I was moving inside an informationworld, . . . I was totally immersed.

It is clear that students had not forgotten for a moment that they were using an arti-®cial environment. It seems that human imagination enhances the receiving stimuliand it is possible to provoke ìmmersion' in using various media. There are cases ofìmmersion' without the use of any particular devices, starting from book readingand movie watching (Eddings, 1994). Although our research sample is small, thereis a correspondence with the ®ndings of Psotka and Davison (1994) on the cognitivefactors associated with immersion in virtual environments, with a sample of ®fteenVR users. Their results show that immersion can be seen as a dual phenomenon.First, it depends on basic biological processes and skills that invoke the cognitivemachinery only when the affordability of the ecological setting is suitable. Second,immersion depends on voluntary attentional skills that depend on self-control, self-consciousness, distractibility, expectations and will power.

After the virtual of®ce, 11 students explored the phenomenon of eutrophication inlakes using the virtual worlds of project LAKE. Environmental education has a seriesof theoretical and practical correspondences with VR, through its scienti®c and cog-nitive objectives. Both of them have parallel ambitions, favouring learning through

Table 4. Students' expressions after their ®rst experience (N � 20)

Category of expression Examples of expressions N

Keen Fabulous, fantastic, fascinating,astounding

6

Interest Very interesting 8Impressiveness Impressive 6Engaging & amusive neat, engaging 12Novelty Surprising, new dimensions 4User-friendly Easy, direct adaptation 5Reference to the number ofviewpoints

4

Ìmmersion' �See text 10Positive New sensation, no lassitude, not boring 6Critical �See text 2Training dif®culties Needs training, no direct familiarization 5Troublesome Dizziness in the beginning, slow 3Negative Not impressive 2


senses, providing a sense of freedom and reducing the tendency for homogeneousbehaviour (Mikropoulos et al., 1997). It is our opinion that the use of virtual worldshas to be supplementary in environmental education projects, reinforcing theàbout the environment' dimension of knowledge. It contributes beyond knowledgeacquisition, to the experience and sensitization of students to environmental pro-blems. Such a way of use operates towards the `for the environment' direction. Re-sults concerning the use of VR in environmental education will be presented in aforthcoming qualitative research paper.

A problem we faced with project LAKE is the balance between the realism of the vir-tual worlds and the immediate response of the system during navigation and inter-action. We decided to represent with realism (concerning shape and behaviour)actors known to the students, such as ®sh and ¯ora, and give symbolic representa-tions (spheres) to the rest of them (plankton, oxygen, salts). The virtual objectshave physical properties, such as velocity, as well as behavioural rules.

After two meetings with the students exploring the virtual environment for 30 mineach session, they were asked to answer a series of questions. The students wereencouraged to give analytic comments. Their answers are summarized in Table 5.Concerning the realism of the representation, all the students wanted an increase ofrealism, even at the expense of the navigation speed, and nine of them found thelake surface suf®ciently visible. Nine students found the representation of dilutedoxygen suf®ciently good as spheres going up from the bottom to the surface, and se-ven found the phytoplankton and salts as green and grey spheres to be insuf®cient.From discussion with the students it emerges that they are satis®ed with oxygen be-cause it is represented as bubbles. However, the students have a different mentalmodel of phytoplankton and salts that does not conform with a sphere, stating thatthese are big molecules but that they know them from everyday life as small plantsand grains, respectively. It seems that they want to exploit VR to explore existingplaces that they would not otherwise have access to (Stuart and Thomas, 1991).Nevertheless, 65% of the students want to be able to transcend the limits of the realworld, being able to enter the bottom and walls of the virtual lake. Stuart and Tho-mas (1991) propose two types of representations in cyberspace in the educationalprocess. The ®rst one uses naturalistic scenes that semi-realistically present objectsand relationships. The other uses abstract scenes with objects and relationshipsnot as they appear in the real world, but designed to highlight conceptual relation-ships. They also propose representations falling between these extremes on the nat-uralistic=abstract spectrum. It seems that our students prefer naturalisticrepresentations with properties overcoming reality.

Seven of the students think that enrichment of the virtual worlds with sounds wouldbe highly helpful, and 27% of little help. Concerning the type of sounds in the virtualenvironments, six students prefer natural sounds (water, wind, ripple), three musicas an emotional hint, and two of them both natural sounds and music. Probably thisis the ®rst indication for Hereford and Winn's (1994) assumption that sound has thesame role in virtual environments as it does in the real world. In particular, soundshould provide useful and consistent feedback to users about the success and


Tab

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Studen

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(N�

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appropriateness of their actions, the interface's metaphor and extend the user's`®eld of view' beyond the screen (virtual worlds with different levels of eutrophica-tion, lake surroundings). Concerning the number of the default available viewpoints,82% of the students found that the 15 existing viewpoints as starting points for theirnavigation were enough. With regard to interconnection of the different virtualworlds of different levels of eutrophication and the representation of the buttons,®ve students agree with the existing selection (numbers on the buttons), two prefera representative picture of each world giving its characteristics at a glance, two pre-fer a verbal hint, and one a combination of picture and hint. Moreover, half of thestudents prefer to use buttons for the selection of the world, and the other half pre-fer to enter each world navigating inwards. Concerning some kind of help for the ap-plication and the representations involved, there are some tables and picturesdescribing the virtual objects and the level of eutrophication of each world. Twostudents want some explanation for the entire application, three of them do notneed help, two need some explanation for phytoplankton and salts, one for oxygen,and two of the students did not answer. The demand for help topics on oxygen, phy-toplankton and salts correlates with the results concerning their representations(Questions 9 and 10, Table 5).

Navigation devices

After the subjects' experiences with the two virtual environments (virtual of®ce andLAKE), they commented on the four peripheral devices used for navigation. Theseare the common mouse, the joystick, a spaceball, and a space mouse. The spaceballis a true three-dimensional input device that detects the slightest ®ngertip pressureapplied to it and resolves it into X, Y and Z translations and rotation components in-stantaneously and simultaneously. This provides natural, intuitive, smooth, dy-namic simultaneous six degrees-of-freedom interactive control of three-dimensionalgraphical images or objects (Spaceball 2003, 1993). The space mouse has very simi-lar characteristics. Its cap suspended by springs, is moved by the user's hand andthe movements are measured via an optoelectronic measuring system giving infor-mation allowing simultaneous control in six degrees-of-freedom (Space ControlCo.).

The students had the chance to use two or more of the peripheral devices. Becauseof similarity of spaceball and space mouse, we put them together. Ten of the usersused the mouse, eight the joystick, and seven of them the spaceball and=or spacemouse. We asked the students to rank the devices according their ease in learningto use them, and their ease in using them. The results are shown in Table 6. The pre-ference to already known devices such as the mouse is evident, although it is notdesigned for three-dimensional navigation. The students showed a wariness to-wards the specialized devices such as the spaceball and the space mouse. Perhapsthe choice of an easier-to-use joystick is a good solution for the introduction of vir-tual reality in the educational process. There is no evident variation concerning thestudents' attitudes towards the two criteria of learning using and the ease in usingthe input devices.


CONCLUSIONS

The present study is a case study with a relatively small sampling population. Thisis a common characteristic of research investigations on new technologies in theeducational process (Ainge, 1996), there being two main reasons. The ®rst reason istechnical. There are constraints on the number and type of experimental `setups'possible, especially speaking for VR systems. It can be overcome by extending theduration of the research, but this poses some other limitations. The second reasonis methodological. Researches such as the present one need in depth investigationand long exploration with the tools rather than a simple answering of question-naires. Thus the samples are small and the researches have to have a qualitative as-pect.

Concerning the hypotheses of this research on the attitudes of education students± future teachers ± towards virtual reality as a tool in the educational procedure,the results are as follows. There is a positive acceptance of VR in the educationalprocess, with a critical attitude of two of the students. It is remarkable that half ofthe students declare that they have immersion experiences, although the VR systemdid not support such a technology at the time of the research. Our results are simi-lar to those of Byrne and Furness III (1994), indicating that VR has a de®nite role ineducation from a merely motivational viewpoint. Also as shown by Grove (1996),most of the students enjoyed their experiences of VR not just because it looks morelike reality.

With respect to the peripheral navigation devices, students prefer the most effec-tive one for navigation in VEs. This is the common mouse, not the most suitable fornavigation in the three-dimensional cyberspace. It seems that the students' investi-gations in VEs are discipline oriented, and they do not try hard to learn how to usemore ef®cient èxotic' input devices. This is the ®rst indication that the technologyneeds to be adapted to humans and not the other way around. We obtain almostthe same results as Schaefer and Wassermann's (1995) preliminary results on adultstudents' reactions to low-cost VRs. Our two virtual environments were understoodby the users at an intuitive level, with some negative observations on the navigatingdevices.

Table 6. Students' attitudes towards the peripheral devices (N � 11)

N

Ease in learningMouse versus joystick 6±2Mouse versus spaceball=space mouse 6±0Joystick versus spaceball=spacemouse 2±2

Ease in usingMouse versus joystick 5±3Mouse versus spaceball=space mouse 5±1Joystick versus spaceball=spacemouse 2±2


Our research is still in progress. The main direction is VR in science education in do-mains such as physics, biology, environmental education and geography. At thesame time, a detailed theoretical background for VR as an educational tool is in pre-paration.

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Students' Attitudes Towards Educational Virtual Environments