Jen Scott stood on the ocean floor and looked at her class. She felt the enthusiasm was beginning to lessen, the engagement was not quite what it was. They’d been down here for some time. 

So she thought for a moment, pushed a button, and almost instantly her young explorers were on the side of a mountain, looking down at Machu Picchu. The class hushed as they headed down to the site to explore. 

Scott does these trips a lot. She has taken her class to ancient Egypt, the surface of Mars and deep inside the human body. And each trip, she says, is not only popular but provides a noticeable boost to learning. 

Such is the possibility of the modern classroom when a teacher embraces the potential of virtual reality (VR).

Simmering under the edtech surface for years, if not decades, VR has been touted as the next big thing numerous times and, each time, the end result has been, well, underwhelming. 

As a result, the technology has attracted a high degree of cynicism from teachers - not helped by a general wariness from many about any form of technology creeping into the classroom. 

Yet the latest buzz around VR promises to be different. Facebook and Google are involved, for a start, and they are companies that do not usually back a losing horse. In addition, reviews of products coming to the market have been almost universally positive. And, crucially for education, the VR that has already found its way into classrooms is being met not with derision but with genuine interest and praise. Could it be that VR’s time in education has finally arrived? 

‘Incredible experiences’

“The pupils absolutely loved it,” says Scott, a science teacher at Twickenham Preparatory School, Middlesex. Her students had made their cross-continent, time and space journeys via Google Cardboard and the tech giant’s Expeditions initiative. 

“They were really incredible experiences for the children and you could hear them gasping in amazement. They got really involved, turning and pointing and asking to look at certain things and telling each other what to look at. They were definitely up for more discussions afterwards on what we had looked at - it was fantastic.”

The most common experience schools are having with VR is with the Google technology. Up to November 2016, Google says some 6,500 schools in the UK had tried out the technology. 

On a visit to the UK that month, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai explained that the firm had “already received feedback from thousands of teachers in the UK and they believe that Expeditions can improve literacy and writing skills, and help create excitement to complement traditional teaching methods.”

He announced an aim of getting 1 million UK school children to use VR and pledged to offer five hours of free skills training in the technology to make that a reality. 

The Cardboard device does not look like a pedagogic game changer. It is a basic £15 cardboard unit into which you insert a smartphone and then hold it to your face to view the images inside. The Expeditions app then allows teachers, in the role of “leader”, to control what children see. 

Compared with its (very) pricey competitors on the market, Cardboard is a VR-lite experience. One of the most notable high-end headsets comes from Facebook, with its Oculus Rift device, while HTC’s Vive unit is also attracting rave reviews. Microsoft has what it dubs a “mixed-reality” headset called HoloLens, while rumours suggest that Apple may enter this space, too, in the future. 

The high-end devices offer a more immersive VR experience than Cardboard - far more akin to the “science-fiction” idea of VR where you are absorbed in an environment to the point that you genuinely forget that the experience is not real. There are plenty of clips online of people falling over because they become so engrossed in their VR experience that they forget they are not actually there. 

Google Expeditions programme manager Jennifer Holland claims that, despite her product not being quite so advanced, educators who have tried the technology find that it has a big impact on how they teach certain subjects. “We’ve been thrilled to see teachers use Expeditions to bring abstract concepts to life and provide students with a deeper understanding of the world beyond the classroom, infusing learning with excitement and fun,” she told TES.

‘Everyone loved it’ 

Of course, Google would say that. After all, it is hoping to sell as many of these into schools as possible. But there are plenty of teachers not attached to Google initiatives who back up the company’s claims. 

Glenn Denney, from Whitehill Junior School in Hitchin, was impressed. “Every single member of staff was buzzing about it, and I’ve not seen that before. You usually always get skeptics but, with this, everyone loved it. The children were so impressed and we had lots of them saying it was the ‘best day ever’, or the ‘best lesson ever’.” 

Like Scott, Denney said that using VR helped to inspire the pupils to look at topics they were studying in a new light and it informed their lessons, something that TES edtech columnist and assistant headteacher Claire Lotriet says is crucial to using VR successfully. “It’s a great tool to use as a stimulus for a topic or lesson,” she says. 

On VR in general, she is perhaps less enthusiastic than Denney and Scott, but she says the potential is clearly there. “On the face of it, using VR in classrooms sounds a bit like a fad, but the reality is that it’s just one step on from using an image or a video clip to inspire a lesson, which teachers do effectively all the time,” she says. 

For VR advocates who foresee whole lessons being conducted in a virtual world, reducing the technology to a picture-viewing function may seem to be underplaying it. And if that is all it is going to be, it’s a very expensive luxury. There are plenty who believe that this will always be the case; that despite the growing consensus that this is finally VR’s time, it remains a fad and a distraction with little evidence that it is worth investing in. 

Tom Bennett, the government’s “education behaviour tsar” and founder of ResearchEd, is one of those concerned that users of VR are too uncritical about whether what they are experiencing is just a novelty or something genuinely useful. 

“VR, like many ‘next big things’, is bristling with promise and optimism, but the truth is that there is little data yet to suggest that it has or would have any positive impact on learning,” he says. 

Not inspired

Furthermore, Bennett believes that many pupils are not inspired by the content of what they see when using VR but are simply excited about trying out the technology itself. 

“Children remember what they think about. So will children remember more about the pleasant novelty of VR or will it embed substantive propositional or experiential knowledge? Sad to say, we have little evidence to suggest that it has escaped the gravity of mere distraction.”

He goes on to warn that it may ultimately be nothing more than something teachers can use to distract and subdue children. “Focus without an appropriate topic of focus is pointless. Worse, it’s a waste of time,” he says.  

Denney has some sympathy with this view. He agrees that if VR is not used correctly by teachers, it could easily become nothing more than something to pass the time. 

“I can see that VR could become something where the teacher says ‘if you get your work done you can play with the headsets’,” he says. 

He argues that this would be bad teaching, though, and not necessarily the fault of the VR. “[It would be to miss] the core purpose of it, which should be to inspire pupils, to get their minds working, to take them beyond the classroom,” he says. 

Scott admits she was once one of the doubters, believing VR to be faddish. What changed her mind was first-hand experience of using it. 

“I do think people see it as a gimmick, and to be honest I thought it would just be something nice for children to try and that would be about it,” she says. 

“But now that I’ve actually used it in the classroom and seen the children’s reaction to it, I can see what a huge tool it is for learning. If you can try it, you should, because you can really see what a big impact it is going to have.”

We may have a bit of a chicken and egg situation here. Some teachers don’t want to use it because it might be a waste of time, but only in using it will they establish if this is an unfair judgement. 

Think about VR’s impact on lesson plans

Kirsty Tonks, assistant principal for e-learning and teaching school director at Shireland Collegiate Academy, in the West Midlands, says that it is up to those advocating the technology to lead the way on how it should be integrated. The key is for teachers to make sure that they think about the impact VR could have on their lessons plans, she says.

“If integrated well into the curriculum, it could transform the way in which certain subjects are delivered and ‘experienced’ - creating deeper learning and understanding rather than just through observation.” 

She cites history as a subject where VR could help pupils to understand the environments they are discussing, or English and RE, to see a situation from the perspective of different characters or people. “If planned for effectively, it could truly impact on academic and social learning,” she says. 

But that’s a lot of planning for something that currently has little evidence of impact. Why add to your workload if there is no guarantee it would be more effective than what you do already? To obtain that evidence, what we need is for at least some teachers to start using it, preferably through proper trials and research studies. 

With Facebook and Google on board, there will no doubt be the money around to pay for such studies: VR is big business. While it is still in something of an early-adopter phase, recent research suggests that the VR market is set to be worth $70 billion (£56 billion) by 2020, up from just $1 billion in 2016. Judging by the Google classroom programme, education markets will likely be part of this expected growth.

And as the market grows, the high-end headsets will come down in price. But we will have to wait for that to happen. Where we perhaps run the risk of the educational view of VR being skewed is that the Cardboard VR experience is the one being trialled, whereas the true value of VR may be in those higher-quality sets that may, at some point, be within the financial reach of schools. 

Denney says that some pupils in his school have actually tested some of the higher-priced handsets already. “We have tried the HTC Vive, as our IT support guy had one and he bought it in and set it up for a few children to use. They loved it, from ‘playing’ snooker to looking at the planets in orbit, and I can see there is a real wow factor to it,” he says. However, Denney believes price is not the only issue with these headsets. “Costs are high, yes, but the bigger problem, in some ways, is that it’s far less inclusive, as only one child at a time can use it. This makes it harder to use for teaching as you have to wait for everyone to use it, which is hardly ideal,” he says. 

Scott agrees: “The benefit of the Google devices [we tried] is that everyone could use one. It didn’t isolate the children by having to get them to wear a big headset. Instead they could just hold it themselves and then, if you wanted to talk to them, they could just put it down and engage with you.”

Suited to mass participation

Cardboard is clearly more suited to the mass participation for the classroom, then, and industry analysts doubt the price for the high-end headsets will be reduced enough, soon enough, to threaten that. 

“High-end VR headsets require pairing with high-powered PCs and graphics cards in order to work, which are typically not of the calibre currently existing in schools’ computer suites,” says Emily Talbot, technology research and insights manager at Deloitte. 

“Due to this, and the costs associated with the development of specific educational content, we expect that Cardboard VR (paired with mobile phones) will be the most likely to be used in schools in the short term.”

But the Cardboard headsets are not without cost issues either. While the headset itself costs only £15, it requires a smartphone to work and most schools don’t have scores of these lying about, or the budget to buy them.

“The real issue with VR is cost,” says Lotriet. “The difficulty is that Google Cardboard, and some other similar headsets, are designed to work with smartphones rather than tablets. Google really needs to develop a version for tablets - assuming that schools have mobile phone-sized devices is a bit of an oversight.”

Indeed, pedagogical concerns are less common among those teachers that have used VR than logistical ones: with most schools spending their technology budgets on tablets, the fact that the most accessible VR technology is smartphone-based could well be the major issue that stifles uptake. 

Denney has a plan to counter the cost issue, though. “People change their phones on a regular basis so I am planning to put a request out to parents to say, rather than just leaving your old phone in a drawer, or getting a few quid for it online, donate it to the school,” he says. 

“The great thing is that the devices don’t need to be top of the range, they really just need to be able to handle the Expeditions app and that isn’t particularly difficult.”

As smartphones perhaps become more commonplace in schools, particularly as pupils often own handsets that are suitable for VR (see analysis, page 8), this may not be necessary. 

But even with some borrowed smartphones and a big push from Google, it does appear that, though VR may be on the cusp of the mainstream, in schools it will remain more of a curiosity than a classroom fixture for at least the immediate future. 

The case in terms of how VR should be used for teaching beyond a lesson starter - and the data to back that up - just isn’t in place yet. 

On the plus side, that gives teachers the power to begin to explore and dictate the direction the big companies offering VR should take the technology - getting involved early on could create a VR experience that is useful and that can be evidenced as such. 

The big companies will be all ears. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and the rest will be doing everything they can to push the technology in all key market segments, including education.

So will VR find a place in schools eventually? It seems inevitable. Rather than a wave that recedes back as it has done in the past, it’s likely that this time VR will stick around, gradually finding a home in schools. 

Dan Watson is a freelance technology journalist

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