Ecampus Research Fellows

3D Immersive, Collaborative and Interactive Learning and Training Environments have been foci of research for decades with the goal to transform education towards student-centered learning (Dede et al. 2017). Recent acceleration in ever more affordable hardware has fueled a tremendous increase in the number of virtual reality (VR) applications in the learning domain. However, studies assessing the effectiveness of these commercial applications are few and lag behind this development. In this context, we propose a one-year project studying the technological adoption of current immersive virtual reality technology in college-level educational environments. This proposal corresponds to the third category of projects supported by the Ecampus Research Fellows Program (Studies on tools, techniques, and platforms for online teaching and learning). The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of existing off-the-shelf collaborative VR products and verify the aptitude of the current applications with respect to the requirements elicited from educators. The outcomes of this study will help us identify the opportunities and challenges concerning the adoption of the new VR tools in the college-level class environment and help in defining the needs for future curriculum design efforts.

This research uses one class, ANTH 407 Seminar Anthropology Lecture Series, as a space for comparative analysis of two different delivery modalities – synchronous vs. bichronous (a blending of synchronous and asynchronous delivery). The ANTH 407 course brings speakers from across campus and across the globe, providing our students with the opportunity to interact with professionals within the field of anthropology as well as engaging with the most up-to-date anthropological research. Our hypothesis is that by providing this opportunity to Ecampus anthropology majors we can create stronger connections between our distance majors and the Oregon State University Anthropology unit and the discipline of Anthropology. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods and digital tools for monitoring, measurement and evaluation of the impact each delivery modality has upon the student population will give the OSU Anthropology unit the ability to make a data-driven decision about the possible student outcomes for each delivery modality. Our research results would be directly useful for the advancement of OSU Ecampus and the sophistication of distance education.

In many on-campus classes, collaborative projects engage students in shared creative experiences. Verbal and nonverbal interactions within the classroom provide lessons in group decision-making, brainstorming, teamwork, and leadership. These experiences prepare students for work in professional environments. The principal investigator (PI) teaches on-campus classes in which student teams design and create 3D environments for virtual reality (VR) projects. Student teams often work around tables or computers as they develop their projects. This type of interaction is not currently available to students taking online classes. Virtual Reality can potentially be an alternative to this type of physical interaction. The proposed research will focus on one central question: What is the student experience of interacting and collaborating in VR? To answer this question, we will deploy Oculus Quest VR headsets in NMC 351: New Media Visualization during Summer and Fall terms, 2021. Summer term will be an Ecampus version of the class, where synchronous collaboration will take place in small teams using social VR apps. Fall term will be either on campus or synchronous remote modality. For the fall class, in addition to small group meetings, the full class will meet in VR. In all cases we will observe student interactions within the VR apps. We will also interview students to assess their experiences working collaboratively in VR. This is an exploratory study with broad implications for social interaction in virtual space.

This project proposes a study of mindfulness as a resource for online students to engage in Multicultural Education and be empowered to learn challenging topics like racism, gender oppression, and privilege. Mindfulness employs a wholeness approach incorporating social, emotional, spiritual and mind/body tools to settle one’s attention and calm reactions in order to stay present and engaged. Online students will be taught mindfulness through ten videos and asked to reflect in assignments about its value and how it supports learning. In an era of high anxiety and uncertainty, along with racism at the center of society’s struggles, online educators must help develop undergraduates’ human capacity for engaging thoughtfully and compassionately in conversations about racism, sexism, and social justice. This research is guided by the following research questions: 1) How does online mindfulness help students understand multicultural content? 2) How do aspects of online mindfulness videos help their learning in the following ways (i.e., the instructor, personal examples, mindfulness exercises, texts and sources, multicultural content, future careers/K12 teaching, health and wellness, tool for learning)? With grounded theory, students’ perspectives will be analyzed for how mindfulness supports their learning in the online setting by analyzing their reflection assignments and mid-term evaluations. Findings from a pilot study in an in-person setting showed that Multicultural Education students responded positively to mindfulness as supporting emotional aspects, spiritual connectedness, conceptual content, and physiological aspects to learning, and with this study we intend to find out how to best incorporate mindfulness in online curriculum through use of videos.

The study of materials science is rife with complex concepts that are challenging for many undergraduate students. Although different teaching strategies have been used to identify misconceptions that arise, many instructors struggle to provide prompt, individual feedback due to large class sizes, diverse student backgrounds and/or asynchronous online class offerings with limited student-teacher interactions. Recently, this difficulty has been compounded by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, reducing classroom interactions even more. To address these challenges, our proposal seeks to implement and assess a web-based Adaptive Learning Module (ALM) on the Concept Warehouse platform as a tool to promote asynchronous conceptual learning individualized for each student. The ALM incorporates motivational videos to gain interest, ConcepTests questions to identify misconceptions, Supplementary Instructions to guide individual learning based on their individual misconceptions and provide active learning experiences, and computerized adaptive testing to further arrange suitable challenges for each student based on their performance. Importantly, the ALM system allows higher performing students a more straight-forward path but can diagnose and provide supplementary instruction to those students who need it, where they need it. Our preliminary work has created each component of the ALM separately for the crystallography topic in the Introduction to Materials Science course here at OSU. In this proposal, we will implement the integrated ALM beta version and analyze its effectiveness via student performance and perception using a think-aloud protocol, a split design experiment, and research-validated Concept Inventories. Our conjecture is that the ALM will lead to positive learning experiences for all students.