Real learning through artificial intelligence

University of Redlands School of Business & Society Professor Johannes Moenius was frustrated with distracted learners. After switching to online learning at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Moenius “decided to do something entirely different,” to keep the students in his global business course engaged while learning remotely. That entirely different thing was virtual reality.

Students in Moenius’ course are shipped an oculus VR headset allowing him to engage with them despite geographic hindrances. Much like an in-person classroom, Moenius’ virtual classroom includes lectures with slides and the utilization of AI. Unlike an in-person class, Moenius and his students can travel great distances within seconds.

“What we do is a whole range of things, for example, experience other countries,” Moenius said. In taking students on guided tours to locations like Chicago and Kuala Lumpur, Moenius has his students gather relevant business information about the different locations and analyze traffic density, compare products, and understand how advertising is done in different regions. “They can walk around and explore everything that you can get from a VR, that you can't get from a regular 2D video so easily,” Moenius said.

Additionally, students work together in the virtual space and utilize AI (Chat GPT) to complete their homework assignments.

“The students love it,” Moenius said. “Specifically, the integration of VR and AI is what makes it attractive. It accelerates learning by being deeply immersive and it fights distraction. The homework assignments are organized so they learn how to productively learn AI while learning global business,” Moenius continued. “I want them to understand that American riches depend on being technologically better than the rest of the world and the world will turn into a point market thanks to virtual reality.”

Moenius isn’t the only U of R faculty member using VR to teach his students. Biology Professor Ben Aronson in the College of Arts and Sciences is utilizing the Experimental Reality (XR) Lab in the Armacost Library to teach his students enrolled in the biochemistry course.

“It’s designed for the classes that I teach that have to do with visualizing things that are so small we'll never be able to experience them,” Aronson said about using virtual reality.

“VR gives you this experience as if you're shrunk down to the size of an atom, and you're looking at all these atoms around you. There are beautiful 2D images in textbooks and websites where you can rotate the image so you can see the 360 view, but none of those are quite the same experience as VR.”

While Aronson and his students occupy the physical space in the XR Lab, each student is in their own VR room, allowing Aronson to “jump into” that room at any time to experience it with them. With a high level of engagement that rivals that of Moenius’ class, Aronson is witnessing the various applications for VR in a science classroom.

“If students go on to do Ph.D. work, the workspace for particular kinds of biology and biochemistry research will be VR oriented,” Aronson said. “Just imagine that there is a team of five or six people and they're in different parts of the world, or are working remotely, they can all be in this virtual space having this conversation with important spatial data in front of them and solve problems that way.”

Learn more about the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Business & Society.