Development and Evaluation of Virtual Reality Classrooms Through User-Centered Design During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed the way students learn and engage with their peers and instructors. Likewise , instructors had to quickly transform their course materials to suit the online classroom format. Results from a survey of students at an educational institution revealed that perceived levels of learning and collaboration were lessened with the transition to online learning. In this research, we developed a VR classroom through user-centered research and assessed feedback from the students. The goal of the VR classroom was to minimize the pain points of traditional online classrooms as denoted by the survey results while enabling better experiences. Participants rated the VR classroom to be more engaging, fun, immersive, and collaborative than the video conference classroom. Our research indicated VR classrooms improve learning and immersion outcomes and discovered that the greatest detractor from the VR classroom is the inability to take notes, which is an important feature for future research. In this paper, we also report on the future direction of the study focusing on the security component of the VR classrooms