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G. Rakoczi:
"Introducing Virtual Reality in e-Tutoring Training: Application and Challenges";
Talk: The Online, Open and Flexible Education Conference (OOFHEC2018), Aarhus, Dänemark; 2018-10-10 - 2018-10-12.

Future e-tutors will require new competencies when supervising future digital learning environments. One of the main future educational technologies - according to the Horizon Report 2017 (Higher Education Edition) - will be virtual and augmented reality. Preparing e-tutors to be able to use this technology is evident and requires new skills. Therefore existing curricula of current training programmes for e-tutors need to be extended. Besides teaching "classical" competencies such as tutoring and moderating online forums, chats, web-conferences or other educational tasks in course management systems, additional skills focusing on teaching with virtual reality have to be introduced. This paper addresses this issue by implementing virtual reality and 360-degree videos in e-tutoring training at University level. The goal of this approach is to provide future e-tutors first-hand experience with these emerging technologies and to broaden their skills by experiencing potentials for teaching, moderation, communication and tutoring tasks in virtual reality environments. This paper describes how the first steps were taken to anchor virtual reality in the curriculum of the e-tutor training program. Furthermore this paper includes descriptions of the technical application, the network infrastructure and the didactical framework. The author of this paper also outlines practical recommendations and challenges regarding didactical as well as technical limitations. At last, also insights into students´ experiences are given, as students´ feedback was captured immediately after accessing the virtual reality environment. Students´ responses were analysed with regards to personal immersion, usability, emotional experience and teaching potentials for the future.

e-tutoring training, tutoring curriculum, virtual reality, 360 degree videos, recommendations, emerging technology, didactical and technical implementation