What happens when students create their own content?

What happens when students create their own content?

From smartphones and apps designed to devour our attention to ever-aging learning materials, it’s not a surprise that teachers and professors are having difficulty keeping students engaged. Especially for our younger generations, who have the highest digital literacy of any generation thus far, engagement through traditional teaching methods is tricky. These students, who have grown up with a world of information literally at their fingertips, often find traditional, consumption-heavy education methods less engaging than the dynamic, interactive environments they navigate daily.

Teachers however, are always looking for new ways to transfer knowledge. Recently, we've seen some universities employ student-made VR scenarios to combat some of the dullness of traditional teaching materials. The results have been surprisingly positive! Here's why.

Students creating their own content gain a few major benefits. First, and most important, is a deep understanding of the material that they are creating content for. What usually happens, is a student, or group of students, pick a topic and learning goal (or are assigned one) and then they create a full branching scenario in virtual reality that can be played by other students. During this process, they must consider many different paths, what the incorrect answers are, which answers are best and which are simply acceptable, and so on. The end result is that students know all the “ins and outs” of their topic and essentially become teachers themselves. As Albert Einstein famously said, “if you can teach something, you truly understand it.”

Why Student-Created Content Matters

When students become creators, they move beyond passive absorption into active engagement. Here's why this shift is so crucial:

• Deeper Understanding of learning objectives: Explaining a concept in their own words, designing a VR scenario to represent it, or building an interactive simulation requires a far deeper level of understanding and synthesis than simply memorizing facts. When students create, they truly internalize the material, moving towards a level of mastery that passive learning rarely achieves.
• Boosting Creativity and Innovation: While often guided by specific curriculum objectives, creating VR scenarios still provides a powerful canvas for imagination. Students will learn to innovate within parameters, creatively designing immersive environments, figuring out how to represent complex concepts in 3D, and crafting effective interactions. They'll consider how user choices can lead to different virtual pathways or outcomes, pushing them to think strategically about scenario design and engage deeply with the subject matter.
• Developing Essential Communication Skills: From scripting a VR experience to designing interactive dialogues, students learn to articulate their thoughts clearly, concisely, and for a specific audience. This hones their written, verbal, and visual communication abilities – skills vital in any future career.
• Enhancing Digital Literacy: Beyond just using apps, students learn to manipulate digital tools thoughtfully and ethically.
• Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking: What's the best way to design this immersive environment? Which interactions will best convey this complex idea? Content creation is inherently a series of problem-solving challenges.
• Increasing Engagement and Motivation: When students are given agency and a platform for their voices, their motivation skyrockets. Learning becomes less about fulfilling requirements and more about expressing themselves and contributing meaningfully.

What Kind of VR Content Can Students Create?

The types of content that can be created by students is generally limited by the resources and locations available. While we’d all like to create a true-to-life replica of the roman coliseum as is was in its glory days, students will find themselves more suited to replicating smaller situations that can be easily recorded today.

Here are just a few examples of VR scenarios students can create:

• Healthcare & Patient Interaction:
  • Scenario Type: Practicing patient intake interviews, demonstrating empathy in a virtual clinic setting, explaining post-operative care instructions, or navigating a simplified hospital layout to find equipment.
  • Relevant Disciplines: Nursing, Pre-Med, Health Sciences, Communications, Psychology.
• Customer Service & Professional Communication:
  • Scenario Type: Role-playing a front desk interaction to handle a common customer complaint (e.g., long wait times, billing issue), practicing active listening with a virtual client, or conducting a mock job interview.
  • Relevant Disciplines: Business Administration, Hospitality Management, Communications, Human Resources.
• Language & Cultural Immersion:
  • Scenario Type: Practicing ordering food in a virtual restaurant in a foreign language, navigating a street market to ask for directions, or role-playing simple social greetings in a culturally appropriate way.
  • Relevant Disciplines: Modern Languages, Linguistics, International Studies.
• Technical Skills & Procedural Training:
  • Scenario Type: Demonstrating the steps to assemble a simple machine, performing a routine lab safety check, identifying components of an engine, or virtually walking through a building blueprint to locate specific features.
  • Relevant Disciplines: Engineering Technology, Vocational Trades, Architecture, Computer Science, Laboratory Sciences.
• Historical & Environmental Exploration:
  • Scenario Type: Creating a virtual tour of a specific historical room or small archaeological site, visualizing a simplified local ecosystem, or demonstrating the water cycle.
  • Relevant Disciplines: History, Environmental Science, Archaeology, Geography.

A Sample Use Case

One of the best cases for student created VR content comes from one of our own clients, Fontys University in the Netherlands.

The long and short of their case is that students from the university create their own content using Warp VR. Their students are preparing for various medical roles in hospitals, and through their development of VR scenarios, they’re getting intimately familiar with the vital roles that they will be filling. You can read more about it in our customer stories page.

How to get started

It might seem daunting at first, but getting started with student created content isn’t that difficult:

• Identify key learning topics: Every class has its key learning objectives and because students will gain such a deep level of learning, it’s best to pick the most important topics for VR scenarios.
• Start Small: Begin with short, manageable projects. Even a simple interactive VR scene can be a powerful motivator.
• Provide Tools and Training: Introduce user-friendly VR development platforms and offer brief tutorials.
• Emphasize Process Over Product: Focus on the learning journey – the research, the storyboarding, the building, the testing, the peer feedback, the revisions – rather than just the final output.
• Model and Collaborate: Show them examples, even your own attempts! Work alongside them on a project.
• Celebrate and Share: Showcase student work! Recognition is a huge motivator.

Conclusion

Having students create their own VR content is a fast track to deep understanding and proficiency. In truth, students don’t succeed in the world because they were able to regurgitate facts from textbooks, they demonstrate mastery through understanding what they’ve learned - not just repeating it. By having students develop their own content, they will gain that deep understanding that they need to be successful - and pass the tests.