Enhancing the student experience with a virtual reality disease diagnostics lab at ALT-ELESIG conference

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining increasing interest as an educational technology which can be integrated within Higher Education (HE) teaching. The University of Glasgow has been working with immersive technology company, Sublime Digital, to create project ‘Edify’, which allows teachers to lead classes within immersive 3D environments remotely via Zoom. A VR laboratory was implemented within a Junior Honours Molecular Methods course enabling the 500 students undertaking the course that year to experience a laboratory environment despite COVID-19 restrictions. The purpose of our study was to understand the impact of VR on learning outcomes which we investigated by comparing VR delivered by-proxy to less immersive online teaching methodologies.