Social VR as an approach to foster collaboration among scientists and educators within the networked infrastructure for education

Abstract

With the current development of a central digital infrastructure to connect education, the Federal Republic of Germany aims to unite the multitude of existing educational platforms and offerings in order to enable broad, easy-to-use, personalized, and self-governing access to lifelong education and to facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders. Regarding the latter, a key challenge is to identify suitable technologies, and to evaluate, technically connect, and didactically use them thoroughly. In the present case study, we examined social virtual reality (VR) as a technology for scientific collaboration by carrying out a virtual scientific conference to assess perceived task-technology fit and technology acceptance. Participants (N = 31) reported a medium to high perceived fit, ease of use, and usefulness for social VR, resulting in a high behavioral intention for future use of the technology. In line with previous approaches to integrate task-technology fit and technology acceptance theory, the applied technology's fit predicted perceived ease of use and usefulness to result in a higher intention to use social VR. Overall, social VR appears suitable and sufficient for collaboration in the framework of scientific gatherings and is, therefore, to be considered a component of the digital infrastructure called “Digitale Vernetzungsinfrastruktur für die Bildung�������������. However, in line with previous research, the results point to the need for further development of social VR with regard to both technology and design to further enhance its suitability and convenience.