Developing intercultural competencies through virtual reality: Internet of Things applications in education and learning

The 21st century workplace is an increasingly intercultural and collaborative environment. As a result, soft skills are being recognized as deficient in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates. Our program, Purdue Polytechnic Leadership Academy seeks to improve essential workplace skills for STEM students through virtual reality (VR) simulations that immerse students in intercultural leadership case studies. Experiencing something from a distance is a new type of collaborative technology enabled by the internet of things known as telehora. Students will actively participate in the virtual environment, both responding to and looking around in the virtual environment. Students will experience firsthand how the choices they make within the modules change the outcomes of the case. Once developed, the modules can be deployed in traditional and online classrooms or as self-study. The modules can be scaled to provide a safe and replicable experience for large student cohorts, with potential to expand to multiple universities and industry. Students are unable to gain these experiences through formal education by other means, making the experiences good candidates for VR application. Virtual reality combined with sensors for emotion tracking represent a novel educational application of Internet of Things hardware. We will compare efficacy of high-cost VR hardware to low-cost VR and traditional computers, examining how student engagement and outcomes are affected by the different delivery mediums, thereby contributing to our understanding of these novel technologies. Research methods will include measures of intercultural competence, tolerance for ambiguity, facial emotion detection, and a combination of galvanic skin response and electromyography. This data triangulation will provide insights into the effectiveness of the interventions on traditional outcomes and give researchers a better understanding of emotion's role in intercultural leadership interactions. The provides an immersive and safe learning environment for students to participate in intercultural leadership scenarios that cannot be replicated in traditional classrooms.