Stevan Anas headed to DevLearn 2016 with a mission: Find away to integrate new technology into St. John Ambulance’s firstaid training to boost its appeal and effectiveness. Anas was particularlyinterested in the possibility of using 360-degreevideo in eLearning.
Jennifer Coles headed to DevLearn 2016 with a differentmission: Find new technologies to integrate into eLearning and ensure that Pathways Training and eLearning,a Toronto-based eLearning vendor, remained an innovative leader.
Both organizations were interested in virtual reality (VR)and curious about whether—and how—they could create scalable, budget-friendly,immersive eLearning solutions.
Coles, the senior director of learning and development atPathways, focused on reality: “The budgets here in Canada don’t tend to be hugefor learning projects,” she said. She sought to create immersive training for“not that much more than a typical eLearning module would cost.”
Anas, an electronic pedagogy and information consultant atSt. John Ambulance (SJA) in Vancouver, British Columbia, is a self-describedtechnology enthusiast who’s always looking for ways to bring new technologyinto education and training. He, too, faced constraints. First aid trainingstill relies heavily on instructor-led classroom training and is resistant tochange. Another limitation: “We wanted to keep this small enough that mobiledevices could use it.”
A match made at DevLearn
On the final morning of the conference, Coles, “trying tosqueeze in one last session” before her flight, found herself chatting with theman sitting next to her in the Using360-Degree Video in Training session.
Anas was about to explain to yet another clueless Americanwhere Vancouver was, when he discovered that Coles was a fellow Canadian. They soonfound additional common ground.
“As a not-for-profit, we didn’t have the ability to make a360 video or immersive experience, while Pathways was looking for a potentialpartner,” Anas said. Pathways planned to create a demo piece to show clients howto incorporate this new technology into their eLearning; they were looking foran organization with suitable content. “We just happened to meet at the rightplace at the right time.”
SJA and Pathways began discussing a joint project. “Within afew weeks, our relationship blossomed,” Anas said.
SJA is part of a 900-year-old international first aid andmedical services organization. A key provider of first aid and CPR training inCanada, the organization also trains volunteers to offer first aid and firstresponse services at hockey games, concerts, and other public events.
Anas’s team at SJA came up with a couple of ideas for theimmersive simulation, including a CPR simulator, and began preproductionplanning with Pathways. Within a few weeks, though, they realized that the CPR contentwas a poor match for the technology. “The process in itself is quite linear,”Anas said. “There’s no reason to have a 360 environment. Everything is alreadyin front of the person.”
Coles agreed. “The benefit of 360 video is that you have tobe able to look around.” Besides, she added, “CPR is something you can easilyreplicate in a classroom environment.”
Back to the drawing board. The other idea that Anas’s teamhad considered was a mass-casualty response simulation, since the Vancouver SJAchapter trains hundreds of first-response volunteers.
Coles, an instructional designer, immediately saw thepotential. A mass-casualty event is not easy to replicate in a classroom. “Youneed to have lots of people injured, you need to have lots of actors andactresses; it’s very time-consuming if you’re doing it in a classroom everytime. And how do you actually simulate that panic and shock?” she said. “Wethought that that was a much better example of curriculum that would make senseusing virtual reality.”
Figure 1: Avolunteer makeup artist prepares “victims” for the mass-casualty simulation (Jennifer Coles/Pathways Learning)
It was settled. A mass-casualty response simulation was theperfect match for their foray into 360-degree video training.
How do you storyboard non-linear content?
The simulation would be part of a blendedlearning solution, Coles and Anas explained. Learners would cover theprocess—how a first aid responder decides which patient to help first—in theclassroom. They would then apply that learning in the simulator’s realisticvirtual environment. The protocol calls for a first responder to visit eachpatient and assess their injuries. After evaluating all patients, the responderreturns to the highest-priority patient to administer first aid.
Coles tackled key instructional design decisions. Reviewingclassroom content would make the VR experience too long, she decided. Instead,the simulator guides learners using feedback and graphical prompts.
In a true “unlocked” VR environment, learners can goanywhere at any time, Coles explained. But, “in order for the learning to takeplace, we needed them [the learners] to see every single person who wasinjured.” Her solution starts with a “locked” environment—a short video showingall of the injured patients that all learners watch. Then, navigation is unlocked,allowing learners to move around the environment and choose which patient towork with.
Figure 2: Whata learner sees depends on where they are in the simulation; they cannot alwayssee all five patients (JenniferColes/Pathways Learning)
To keep the project manageable, the teams settled on fivepatient scenarios. Learners experience different content with each patient, andtheir interactions vary according to the order in which they choose patients. Learnerscan interact with patients in any order, so the team had to anticipate a widevariety of interactions and script potential responses. “Instead of saying whysomething was incorrect, we ended up with a more universal response that wouldsteer the learner to the correct answer,” Anas said. Learners might getfeedback that reminds them of the process, such as an arrow pointing out thebetter choice, with the reminder, “It’s better to start with the closestpatient,” for instance.
Upon choosing a patient, learners are “teleported” or movedautomatically to the side of a selected patient. This strategic decisionsignificantly reduced both the cost of production and the size of the completedmodule. Shooting all of the video sequences required for “walking animation”would approximately “quintuple the number of video assets,” Anas said.
Even so, preproduction was significantly more complicatedthan for an ordinary video. “Bar none, the biggest challenge was storyboardingit,” Coles said. For typical eLearning, she said, storyboarding is linear. Youteach a concept, test learners, move on to the next idea. “How do youstoryboard when you have no idea where the learner is going?”
Preproductionoccupied the teams for over three months. And, Coles said, “Even as we wereshooting, things were changing. In the end, the product was quite differentfrom what had been scripted out.”
Lights, camera, action!
Julio Ordonez, product programming manager at PathwaysLearning, spent about a month researching cameras and editing software duringpreproduction. “We considered the output files. We could have used a GoPro rigwith six cameras, but in the end, you would get a massive video file,” Ordonezsaid. He heeded advice that Coles had picked up at DevLearn, choosingrecommended plug-ins and purchasing stitching software for postproduction.
Production day arrived. SJA had borrowed Vancouver’s Rogers Arenafor the day, and had recruited volunteer actors and even a makeup artist whoknew how to do “casualties.”
“The production is a bit more challenging because you’reshooting 360 degrees, so there’s no option to use lighting equipment or havepeople standing around or behind the camera,” Ordonez said. “We relied on thearena’s lighting, which was actually really good. And everyone who wasn’t inthe shot—they were just hiding in the bathroom!”
The Ricoh camera that Ordonez selected has a mobile app,which made activating the camera easy, he said. Coles revealed another trick: usinga jogging headband to hold the camera during shooting.
Figure 3: MarkSnook of Pathways Learning prepares to shoot 360-degree video for the masscasualty simulation (JenniferColes/Pathways Learning)
Putting it all together
Ordonez started postproduction as he would with any videoproject, editing with Adobe Premiere and using After Effects and plug-ins toadd graphical and interactive elements. He scripted and recorded audio duringpostproduction to add “some background noises, like people screaming and thingsmoving around,” he said.
While authoring tools exist to create VR experiences,“they’re usually for virtual tours or things like that—not related toeLearning,” Ordonez said. He created custom code to add multiple-choicequestions, embed video, track learner results—and “SCORM wrap” the entirepackage for use in clients’ LMSs. Ordonez created two versions, the VR versionthat uses Google Cardboard and a desktop version that offers 360-degree viewsfor learners using a mouse.
In testing the immersive version, the team discovered that learnersdidn’t know how to use the technology. “In eLearning, we know to click next,next, next; in virtual reality, you don’t know what to do. I thought that youhad to walk toward the patient,” Coles said. “The first thing I did was—Iwalked straight into the wall of the board room.”
But with the teleporting design, all a learner has to do isfocus her gaze on the location where she wants to go, and she’s ported there.That adds in a nice bit of accessibility,Coles and Ordonez point out: The simulator can be used by anyone who can moveher head.
Some early users who removedtheir glasses to use the cardboard viewers found the text hard to read, soa user-friendly auto-zooming feature was added, Anas said, in keeping with theteams’ goal of “trying to make things common sense and usable for as manypeople as possible.”
Figure 4: Apage from the storyboard for the tutorial labels the branching options thatlearners can select (JenniferColes/Pathways Learning)
To teach learners what to do, Ordonez added a tutorial. “You’rein the bathroom at the Rogers Arena, and the first thing you have to do is putyour sight on an arrow to activate the simulation,” Coles said. “We wantedlearners to understand how you navigate in VR, because we knew that, once theygot into the simulation, they might get stuck.”
Immersive simulation wows learners
Coles and Anas are pleased with reaction to the simulator,which is available as an online demo.They drew a large crowd when they demonstrated the project at DevLearn 2017’sDemoFest and during a conference session.
The realistic feel of immersive training makes eLearningmore effective, Coles said. She believes that this project, which demonstratesthe viability of budget-friendly immersive eLearning solutions, represents thefuture of eLearning. “A lot of institutions aren’t there yet in terms ofadopting, but I think more and more firms will embrace it in the next year ortwo,” she said.
Ordonez sees the lack of VR-ready eLearning authoring toolsas a potential barrier. “We’ve got custom code which we can now easily layeronto any 360 video, but for people who want to do it in-house,” it’s morecomplicated than creating typical eLearning, he said. Coles and Ordonez areconfident that tools will be developed as demand grows; they’re evenconsidering developing an authoring tool themselves.
People like being able to use their own phones to access thesimulator, Anas said, rather than having to use a VR headset. “They were reallyawed by the way we’re integrating the technology into the learning,” he said.
Anas encourages training professionals to take the plungeand use 360-degree video in eLearning. He said DevLearn was a great place tonetwork and learn. “Everyone wants to share their experiences, to create bettereducational tools and content.”
