Work-in-Progress—Designing a Multi-User Virtual Reality Environment for Conversational Skills Training of Dietetic Students

Abstract

Nutritional diseases severely impair the everyday life of affected patients and represent a growing proportion of global disease burden. The diagnosis and treatment of these diseases is mainly provided by trained dietitians. Their profession requires highly developed conversational skills. Immersive virtual reality offers learning environments, which could hardly be delivered by classical teaching methods. Previous research suggests that virtual reality can be successfully used for social skills training. However, we are not aware of existing virtual reality applications that are directed at conversational skills training for dietitians. Therefore, this work-in-progress paper presents the development of an immersive learning environment for dietetics. We have set out to design a multi-user VR environment that enables the training of professional conversations between patients and dietitians in a virtual hospital room. Testing a sample of 30 students, we will evaluate the usability of the learning environment. Furthermore, we are investigating whether subjective feelings of social presence, and cognitive load predict learning satisfaction and task performance. We expect that multi-user virtual reality enables effective conversational skills trainings for dietetics. Consequently, its implementation could benefit curricula that are typically constrained by limited in-situ training opportunities.