Ruchi Sembey

Virtual Reality (VR) offers immersive, experiential learning experiences in computing education, however, its successful integration in classrooms require navigating a range of practical organizational and pedagogical challenges. This poster presents insights drawn from post-hoc educator interviews, and researcher reflections, who collaboratively deployed an 'in-the-wild' VR-based lesson in a higher education IT Professional Practice course. Our findings highlight several planning, logistical and class orchestration aspects that influence VR integration, rarely captured in controlled VR studies. We also draw attention to the importance of research aspects such as establishing partnerships with teaching teams, being flexible with classroom dynamics, educator safety and iterative refinements for sustainable VR integration. These findings can provide practical guidance for computing educators and researchers seeking to implement or study VR in authentic contexts.

Virtual Reality (VR) presents opportunities for Human-Centered Computing (HCC) education by facilitating immersive and experiential learning that may help students engage with complex user needs and real-world design contexts. Despite long-term interest in VR in HCC education, its integration into regular teaching practices across higher education remains limited, with a notable gap in understanding educators’ perspectives on the practical considerations that influence the integration of VR into their teaching. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 HCC educators following a brief VR simulation using a head-mounted display and a questionnaire on demographics and prior VR experience. Using thematic analysis, our qualitative findings reveal 21 practical considerations relating to three key themes: (a) technology access and provisioning, (b) pedagogical considerations, and (c) VR design and sourcing considerations. Educators identified diverse practical considerations for effective VR integration, including equipment and tech support, health and safety, cost, instructional design, training needs, and VR content development. Our research findings offer actionable implications for computing educators and administrators to inform the planning and integration of VR-supported learning experiences, and VR designers to design pedagogically-suitable VR experiences. Our study also identified seven future research directions, including the need to examine disciplinary-specific VR needs, develop decision-making frameworks for content sourcing, explore pedagogical facilitation strategies, and investigate real-world implementation dynamics in authentic classroom settings.