The Story of an English Teacher who Entered a Virtual Reality

It’s early summer 2008.  I’m sitting in a university library in England frantically putting together the final few paragraphs of my German language dissertation.  To my left is the dry but useful Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, to my right is my well-fingered Collins English-German dictionary. I swoop, without even looking and for one last time that evening, for the dictionary. In the past four years of this degree it’s become an extension of my body, flanking my arms on a desk or being piggybacked around campus in my bag.  It weighs the same as a baby hippopotamus and has edges which could cut a diamond.

Fast forward 8 years, to 2016. I’d been teaching English for 6 years and after my experience learning and teaching foreign languages I came to the conclusion that standing in front of people, trying to get them absorb vocabulary, grammar and idiomatic expressions is about as easy as scaling Mount Everest in flip flops slathered in butter.  In the 6 years up to 2016 I had plied my trade, but very quickly I realised that I needed to offer more as a teacher.  My students needed more. So I did what any disillusioned teacher would do and bought 6 Go-Pro cameras, a tripod and some software, and started experimenting with web-based virtual reality taking panoramic photographs around London. I learnt some code, annotated some of the objects within those images and then uploaded them to a server so that my students with certain smartphones (i.e., those with motion-sensing features) could insert their device into a cardboard VR headset and get a sense of immersion in the English-speaking world with the advantage of interacting with their surroundings.  That was the turning point.

To have grown up and studied in a world where paper dictionaries to language learners were as vital as a scalpel to a surgeon, and then see the birth and rise of smartphones and their eventual transition into becoming windows through which you could view and begin to interact with alternative realities in 360 degrees profoundly changed how I viewed myself as an educator.  Having the ability to take students, irrespective of their physical location, to virtual worlds, letting them loose in vivid representations of the sights and sounds I had grown up with as a native English speaker, and supporting them pedagogically at the same time felt like ripping back the curtains of a new morning and feeling a multi-coloured flood of light hit my weary face.  Virtual reality now presented me as a teacher with an opportunity to begin to engage and educate students in ways that current textbooks, filled with their cheesy stock photos of butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouth children in some feeble attempt to relate to the target reader, just could never do.

In the recent years which have followed up to today, 2021, we’ve seen another major step forward in our immersive possibilities; standalone VR headsets.  No longer are we forced to choose between smartphone-based VR or much more expensive hardware which requires a hard connection to a high-performance PC to run.  Standalone VR offers a much higher level of immersion but with the added benefit of not needing a smartphone or expensive computer to run. The headset has everything inside it for you to experience VR. But it doesn’t stop there. Just as a marble carver needs more than just a hammer to create a work of beauty, a language teacher requires a number of tools at their disposal to chisel away at and sand down the rough edges of their students’ abilities.

Enter webXR.  New advances in how web browsers can offer more interactivity and visualisation of 3D assets and environments mean that people can begin to not just explore content in creative ways, but tap into the range of tools already out there to facilitate the relatively easy creation of virtual and augmented reality experiences too.  It is precisely this - the availability of intuitive content creation platforms - which opens the floodgates to a whole new way of involving students in hands-on projects, building their digital literacy and collaboration skills to not only build their own immersive educational experiences on topics they’re covering in class, but to virtually jump into those environments and meet their peers around the world in real time, sharing their creations and developing their communicative skills.

* Italian students using their virtual avatars as part of the VR for English and Future Skills program, presenting their work to American students.