Using VR to Help Students Understand Cultural Differences
A virtual reality project at North Carolina State University is giving engineering students a safe space to explore the cultural assumptions that color global communication.
Category: Teaching and Learning
Institution: North Carolina State University
Project: GlobalVR: Teaching Cultural Competencies Through Virtual Reality
Project lead: Ilin Misaras, assistant director, Global Training Initiative
In an era ripe with mistrust and fear, it's easy to set empathy aside. But what if we could step into the eyeballs of another person to get his or her point of view from the inside? Could that lead to greater understanding? That's the idea for a project at North Carolina State University that uses virtual reality to help engineering students understand different cultural perspectives.
As part of a two-hour workshop, students pop on a virtual reality headset (most recently, that's the $199 Oculus Go) and attend a virtual meeting that brings together a small group of people from the United States, China, India and Singapore.
What those stop-action vignettes reveal, according to Misaras, are the cultural assumptions present in the communication. The discussion that follows then focuses on what the individual characters were thinking.
"It's a safe space. They're all fake characters, so you're not offending anyone," explained Misaras. GTI found that it was helpful for students because they were forced to "take a step back and say, 'OK, maybe there's something cultural going on here.
See the full story here: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/08/21/using-vr-to-help-students-understand-cultural-differences.aspx