Mining Virtual Reality Nuggets: A Pattern-Based Approach for Creating Virtual Reality Content Based on Microlearning Methodology

Microlearning is a current trend in learning and education methodologies that relies on dividing learning content in relatively small and independent learning units. These units are also referred to as nuggets. From a teaching perspective, nuggets are used as a medium in specific learning situations and can be considered a realization of a pattern to reach a basic learning goal at once and in a short amount of time. Being self-contained, learning nuggets can be used flexible within highly diverse curricular structures.In this paper, we present an approach how Virtual Reality (VR) content can be created in an authoring process that is close to the authoring work flow in the application domain e-learning, i.e., an authoring process that dove tails the production of learning nuggets. We explore how VR can be utilized as a medium for microlearning and identify basic patterns that serve as a conceptual foundation for realizing VR content in a form that we call VR nuggets. The proposed approach is called mining for these VR nuggets. We present a prototype implementation of the identified VR nuggets based on Unity and a user study shows that our approach is well accepted by domain experts. We consider how VR- and microlearning-specifics can be joined and indicate a successful application of the proposed pattern-based content creation method for microlearning.