This multi-site study examined immersive video’s effects on the SIM learning experiences of a diverse student population from the northeastern, midwestern, and southwestern United States.
Contemporary Clinical Simulation(SIM) must dramatically improve ease and cost-efficiency of growing participant capacity(Gaba, 2004). Today, students gather into one SIM center, but experience scenarios differently because of limited space. Immersive videos are a potential solution to make standardized experiences accessible to 10, 100, or even 1000s of remote students at once.
Immersive video viewers feel like they are standing inside the video environment: They can look up, down, and around as SIMs unfold in front of them. Students ‘attend’ trainings by connecting smartphones to low-cost mobile virtual reality(VR) goggles and earphones. Through internet access, students attend pre-recorded SIMs or immersive livestreams from other geographic regions (debriefing can be led through videoconferencing).
This application of immersive video and VR technologies can make producing standardized SIMs cost-efficient and simple. It grows participant capacity easily, and could bring SIM access to remote underserved regions. Additionally, immersive video could enable immersive learning in otherwise inaccessible real-world experiences (Bailenson, 2018; Bryan K. Dang & Aebersold, 2019).
Immersive videos help educators direct students’ attention and focus (Bailey & Bailenson, 2017). Student nurses feel greater involvement when observing SIMs through VR headsets than on televisions (B. K. Dang, Palicte, Valdez, & O’Leary Kelley, 2018). Other studies found VR performance in tasks like knowledge acquisition, recall, and psychomotor skills outperformed those on traditional tabletop monitor displays (Allcoat & von Mühlenen, 2018; Krokos, Plaisant, & Varshney, 2019; Stevens & Kincaid, 2015); subjects attribute success and confidence to VR’s unique sense of spatial immersion (Farra, Smith, & Ulrich, 2018; Krokos et al., 2019).
Methods:
All sites divided students into 4 groups: Immersive video observers(VR), SIM bedside observers(BO), television observers(TV), and active SIM participants(AP). All sites ran the same standardized scenario, and administered knowledge tests immediately pre and post SIM. The tests measured explicit knowledge to be acquired from the SIM, as well as implicitly transferred knowledge. An additional posttest measured Presence factors for cross-media comparisons of engagement, spatial presence, ecological validity, and negative effects (disorientation, dizziness, etc.).
Results:
Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests showed increases in transferred knowledge between pre- and posttests (P value=.005). After adjusting for pre-test scores, no differences were seen between learning modalities for acquired or transferred knowledge. However, knowledge pretests were important predictors of posttest ranks (P value<.0001). Differences were seen in mean spatial presence and engagement ranks. Pairwise difference trends in VR and TV persisted across engagement, spatial presence, ecological validity, and negative effects (P values=.1407, .1581, .2534, .2911, respectively).
Conclusion:
While VR and TV ranks did not surpass.05 significance, engagement and spatial presence ranks warrant further testing as an option for growing SIM. No ecological validity difference between VR and TV was anticipated, and negative effects values should converge as VR technology matures. Investigators noticed that immersive videos may also motivate richer reflections in SIM debrief, and spark deeper, more engaging discussions. This warrants further investigation