VR Application

Hi npmcdonell,
Wow that is a really thought out plan and with technology advancing it may be something in classrooms in the future the thing is it's VR sets are not economically designed 1.price 2. Student comfort imagine having glasses on for a hour long lecture? I see this definitely having its place though I voted your idea up because Khan Academy loves to see how technology advances to help classrooms etc.

That would be so cool

I'm researching VR education for my Master's degree! This would be amazing, I've always loved khanacademy and I want to be able to prove open courseware for VR could become a manageable and efficient method for teaching. It's also becoming more widespread in the industry, with companies utilizing tools like Rumii to have corporate meetings in VR. 

I am introducing 3d printing and VR to Fiji, there is a real need for it here. The youth have no idea about what is out there, and some of the educational programs we have are very useful. Yes, VR is expensive, but it is how things are done now. I hope there can be lessons in how to set up the system software, we had lots of challenges building our VR 'puters, and then applications using VR to introduce various subjects such as medical, engineering, architectural and art.

Lessons could be experienced, rather than shown, very different in terms of total awareness and ability to recall.   The most straight forward would be geography, a producer going to different sites with a historian would be able to work a presentation showing the different locations with a depth that simply couldn't be experienced better without travel, and even then, if the historian explaining what you are seeing as you are moving through is good, it might even provide a better learning experience than a simple unguided visit.     VR is to videos what videos are to pictures, a completely different dimension of learning.   While seeing an Inca pyramid is impressive, the visceral impact of climbing the staggering vertical height, or seeing behind you that the rainforest is really simply covering up obviously different parts of the civilization surrounding you.   One of the best professors at Univ of Michigan would recreate different scenes in Russian history to allow the students to experience it, he never lectured, but presented the experience and then allowed the students to use their own minds to figure out the implications of that experience.   My wife is a TV producer, this can be done, and allow students who would never be able to fly to dozens of locations around the world.   Very different than spoon feeding a student a picture of a location with written text about it, instead hear about what the actual descendants of the Incas want you to learn and understand about their history, see Argentinian cowboys doing their work, see how people are preparing their meals and the food they are eating, infinitely richer experience.  With stitched together 3d video you could even individually explore the site, go where you want to go, see what you want to see after the walk with guided tour, and could be seen beyond the left and right boundaries of the lesson - maybe a student would simply want to walk around the grounds and do a survey on the types of plants they saw on the border of an Aztec ruin versus what might be seen on a virtual walk through the surround paths in the jungle.        Or maybe they were a student where they wanted to listen to bird calls, or languages that were being spoken by visitors.   Again, almost every lesson takes an almost infinitely rich experience and then distills that into what the instructor wants the student to walk away with.   With VR, several different teachers/professors could look at the same experience, the same data, and create very different lessons from that.  

khan has one vid with 360

but i wish khan had it on all vids

I think this would be an interesting and hopefully engaging idea. I'd recommend releasing an app on the Quest store.