The design and evaluation of online lesson units for teaching virtual reality to undergraduates

Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting area of study with many contemporary applications in health care, art, training, and simulation. Unfortunately, virtual reality receives little coverage in the curriculum of most undergraduate institutions. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a series of flexible online lesson units for teaching virtual reality concepts to undergraduate students. Topics for the lesson units were chosen from the Computing Curricula 2001 recommendations for an elective course on Virtual Reality. The VR lesson units were evaluated through focus groups, student surveys, and assessment of student learning. The results of the evaluation have been positive and indicate that this approach does have the potential to achieve the goal of making VR accessible to undergraduate students without disrupting curricular structures. © 2010 IEEE