‘Virtually’ the same learning outcomes. A case study of a virtual client briefed communication project across borders

As the world becomes increasingly more turbulent, complex and competitive, there has been an increased interest in creativity as the major force to prepare students for these demands. At the same time, digital native students today are used to working in an environment rich with instantly accessible information and knowledge, yet paradoxically students are less satisfied with their courses in the online environment. Educators are thus challenged to use innovative methods to nurture creativity online as they would do in the face-to-face classroom. In 2010, six European universities created an international project, named Cross Border Brand Communication (CBBC) that has taken place every year since but in 2020 took place online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This article describes and analyzes the best practices resulting from this case and addresses the research questions as to whether the creative learning outcomes and teaching practices online are the same as face-to-face and to what extent are students satisfied with this learning environment. Reflection on the project and case indicates that although learning outcomes online are “virtually” the same, the student experience is inferior to such face-to-face projects.

An Evaluation of Virtual Reality Role-Play Experiences for Helping-Profession Courses

Background: Providing students with virtual role-play experiences has the potential to bring counseling role-plays into large undergraduate courses. Objective: The purpose of this study was to trial a virtual reality role-play experience where students played the role of a student counsellor. Method: Seventy-three undergraduate psychology students played the role of a student counsellor interacting with a virtual client in two role-plays, one via desktop and one via head mounted display (HMD). Students provided feedback on their experience. Results: 70% of the students found the experiences very interesting, engaging and immersive, with 82% preferring the HMD mode of presentation. The virtual characters were believable as distressed clients with 96% of students perceiving greater negative than positive emotion expressed by the characters. Most of the students (64%) mood improved from the beginning of the experience to the end, however 14% experienced a decline in mood. The students agreed (95%) that the experiences would be a valuable experience to a psychology course. Conclusion: Our results provide evidence that the virtual role-play experiences are well-liked by students. Teaching Implications: The approach presented in this paper represents a practical method to provide virtual role-play experiences to both on-campus and online undergraduate students.

Supporting workforce practice change: protocol for a pilot study of a motivational interviewing virtual client software tool for health professionals

IntroductionMotivating behavioural change during client consultations is of crucial importance across all health professions to address the growing burden of chronic conditions. Yet health professionals often lack the skills and confidence to use evidence-based counselling interventions to support clients’ behavioural change and mobilise clients’ resources and self-efficacy for change to address their long-term needs.AimsThis pre–post pilot study will develop a motivational interviewing (MI) virtual client training tool for health professionals and test the effectiveness of the educational content and usability of the virtual client interaction.Methods and analysisPostgraduate students across a range of health disciplines will be recruited. Data assessing attitudes towards preventive healthcare will be collected using a modified version of the Preventive Medicine Attitudes and Activities Questionnaire. Conversations with the virtual client will be analysed using the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity code to assess changes in MI skills. The System Usability Scale will be used to assess the usability of the virtual client training tool.Ethics and disseminationThis protocol was approved by the Flinders University Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee in May 2019. The results of the pilot study will inform the development of an avatar-based mobile application consisting of MI teaching and interactions with a generic virtual client that can be easily adapted to multiple scenarios.

Design and implementation of a container-based virtual client architecture for interactive digital signage systems

Interactive digital signage is an important Internet of things application and has been becoming a common type of human–machine interface for multiple users. By integrating with wireless sensor networks, a digital signage system can provide smart features and on-demand contents to users. However, the performance of current interactive digital signage systems depends heavily on the server. An increasingly high number of digital signage clients and sensor devices attached to the system generating a huge amount of traffic flowed to the server may create bottleneck, management and scalability issues at the server, especially in large-scale digital signage systems. In addition, the current system requires application installation and configuration at the client side, thus leading to a high cost and complexity of deployment as well as management. This article proposes and implements a container-based distributed virtual client architecture for interactive digital signage to solve the above issues. In the proposed architecture, a number of digital signage clients and Internet of things devices are virtualized and managed by a container-based middleware. Each container-based middleware is responsible to manage and process data for a cluster of digital signage clients and corresponding Internet of things devices to (1) reduce load to server and improve the service performance and (2) enable lightweight clients to reduce cost and complexity in deployment as well as management. Implementation and obtained analysis results show the advantages of the proposed architecture.