Virtual reality, real-life lessons: UTM researcher studies how to effectively use VR in education

When Bree McEwan was a university student in the early 2000s, it was a time when social networks like MySpace and Facebook were rapidly transforming the way people communicated. 

Then as a doctoral student around 2007, she became interested in the topic of interpersonal communication. As part of her dissertation research, one of her questions to participants was: how do you use these social networks to maintain your friendship networks?  

“It became very clear that this was a different way to maintain lots of networks,” says McEwan, now an associate professor at University of Toronto Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology. She's associate director of both ICCIT's digital enterprise management program and the Data Sciences Institute at U of T. 

McEwan has focused her research on the intersection between interpersonal communication and communication technology. She has been recognized as a 2024 faculty affiliate at the Schwartz-Reisman Institute and spoke at an annual SRI conference about social media content moderation. 

Over the years, she has also expanded her research focus to augmented and then virtual reality – which traces back to her time at DePaul University in Chicago. 

“There is a really great VR/AR industry community in the city, and I started seeing more and more opportunities within the city of Chicago to think about augmented reality,” she says.  

The university offered Discover Chicago classes to its first-year students, which allowed them to explore the city’s sites. From 2017 to 2019, McEwan decided to teach a Discover Chicago class on AR – she took students around the city and encouraged them to think about layers of technology and sense of place, along with social justice questions around technology. 

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. McEwan and a colleague were able to purchase a suite of headsets for first-year students. She set up a virtual reality classroom, and in 2020, taught part of the Discover Chicago class in VR. 

“That got me thinking a lot more about VR – what was working, what wasn’t working, and how we are able to communicate in this channel,” she explains. “That’s when I realized that VR is a potentially new way to have social interaction. It’s less about networks than social media, but it got me right back to my roots as an interpersonal scholar.” 

When she began at ICCIT in July 2021, McEwan wanted to study how VR can effectively be used in education. She established the McEwan Mediated Communication Lab – or McMC Lab – that researches how people experience social interaction within VR, with support from students in the Research Opportunity Program.  

Now she can expand her research, thanks to a SSHRC Insight Grant that will fund a study on how VR headsets can enhance educational opportunities. 

For this project, McEwan will be working alongside Michelle Liu from the department of curriculum, teaching and learning and ICCIT’s Michael Nixon. ICCIT Professor Rhonda McEwan, who taught the first VR-related classes at UTM, rounds out the team.   

McEwan says there’s a common belief that VR is better for education because it gives students an immersive environment. However, she and her colleagues have questioned whether immersive learning through VR is in fact better.

She points to studies that show people experience “cognitive overload” while wearing VR headsets, which makes it harder for them to learn.  

“In a lot of these studies, people are put into a VR headset for the very first time and then they’re being asked to learn something,” she says. “But they’re already learning how to use the headset, how to use the interface, and how to use the VR and work through that environment.” 

As part of the SSHRC Insight Grant, McEwan and her colleagues will test whether people have better learning outcomes if the VR headset has a low cognitive load – meaning they’re placed in a classroom setting rather than a more immersive environment when they put on the headset.  

The team wants to learn whether the non-immersive VR environment is better for didactic learning – which is when teachers instruct a class of students who sit and listen. McEwan says the team will also test whether VR headsets that offer more immersive experiences have better outcomes for students who are engaging in more creative tasks.  

“If we can figure out what kinds of learning are more useful in what kind of environments, maybe we can influence some of the folks who are designing virtual environments into creating environments that work better for different purposes,” McEwan says. “Maybe we can have learning experiences within VR that are better designed.”