Virtual Past Places Reinventing the Classroom using Virtual Reality in Humanities Education

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) as a learning environment for higher education has seen steady growth in the last decade. Besides a larger number of users, the body of research into the effectiveness of VR in higher education contexts has also grown considerably. However, recent meta-reviews reveal a lack of studies on the use of VR in the humanities. Furthermore, the potential beneficial affordances to support learning processes have been barely explored. In 2022, the Virtual Past Places (VPP) project was launched, in which VR learning environments were developed, implemented, and evaluated in the context of various courses within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. As such, it offers the possibility to assess potential learning benefits using a large collected empirical dataset based on carefully embedded VR learning environments in Humanities education. In this paper, we discuss the underlying concepts, the project aims, the design process involving co-creation, and the evaluation setup. Finally, we discuss an example VR implementation and provide an outlook towards preliminary evaluation results.