Model and tool to assist the scenarisation of VR-oriented pedagogical activities

Starting: 01/10/2018
PhD Student: Oussema Mahdi
Advisor(s): Sebastien Iksal
Co-advisor(s): Lahcen Oubahssi
Funding: Région

The work presented in this thesis is integrated in the field of Virtual Environments for Human Learning (VRLE) which main objective is to stimulate, accompany and personalize learning in virtual reality environments. Our mission thus established on the basis of the study and analysis of existing VRLE, was to propose technical and methodological solutions to: on the one hand, accompany the teachers in the design and production of the VRLE adapted to their needs and, on the other hand, help the teachers to design, adapt and reuse their pedagogical scenarios based on virtual reality. These objectives guided the proposal of a methodological solution based on a design process that describes the course of an VRLE by detailing the actors involved and the specificities of each step of the process.

We sought to provide solutions for structuring pedagogical situations in the form of reusable scenario models. During this stage, we worked in partnership with pedagogical teams. As a first step, we proposed a VR-oriented pedagogical scenario model.
In a second stage we developed a VR-oriented pedagogical scenario editor which reifies our VR-oriented pedagogical scenario model, to enable teachers to easily model and adapt their situations (in the form of scenarios) and generate their own VRLE.

In this thesis we began by reviewing the literature developed on these topics. The second part of this thesis is dedicated to the specification of the design and production process of VRLE. The third part of the manuscript is dedicated to the development of a model of VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios. All the points discussed in this chapter concern pedagogical scenarisation and the importance of providing design patterns. We have also integrated the concepts of pedagogical activities and pedagogical objects in a VRLE. These have been mentioned in the literature as essential elements for VR-oriented pedagogical situation modelling.

To reify our proposals, we designed and developed a software environment for pedagogical scenarisation adapted to the VR context, called VR-PEAS (Virtual Reality PEdAgogical Scenarisation tool). We have provided our authoring tool with a service for the automatic operationalisation of VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios. It has thus been experimented with different audiences: teachers who are experts in pedagogical scenarisation, teachers with no previous experience in pedagogical scenarisation and teachers who have already participated in the realization of a VRLE. The editor was evaluated in particular from the point of view of usefulness and usability. According to the literature studied and the teachers who have participated in the design and tested the tool, VR-PEAS allows the design of VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios and provides all the necessary elements for the modelling of a VRLE. The feedbacks from the participants have particularly highlighted its simplicity of use and the benefit of having a visual scenarisation tool.