Immersive 360° videos in health and social care education: a scoping review

(2021) 21:590 Blair et al. BMC Medical Education https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-03013-y RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Immersive 360° videos in health and social care education: a scoping review Carolyn Blair* , Colm Walsh and Paul Best Abstract Background: Research on the pedagogical use of immersive 360° videos is a rapidly expanding area within health and social care education. Despite this interest, there is a paucity of empirical data on its application. Method: A scoping review methodology framework was used to search for relevant articles published between 1970 and July 2021. Six databases were used to identify studies using immersive 360° videos for training and education purposes within health and social care: PubMed, Ovid Medline, Psych Info, Psych Articles, Cochrane Database and Embase. Research questions included: Is there any evidence that immersive 360° videos increase learning outcomes and motivation to learn in health and social care education? What are the key pedagogical concepts and theories that inform this area of research? What are the limitations of using immersive 360° videos within health and social education? The four dimensions contained within Keller’s ARCS model (attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction) frame the results section. Results: Fourteen studies met our inclusion criteria. Learning outcomes confirm that immersive 360° videos as a pedagogical tool: increases attention, has relevance in skill enhancement, confidence in usability and user satisfaction. In particular, immersive 360° videos has a positive effect on the user’s emotional response to the learning climate, which has a significant effect on users’ motivation to learn. There was a notable lack of pedagogical theory within the studies retrieved and a general lack of clarity on learning outcomes. Conclusion: Studies examining the effectiveness of such interventions remains weak due to smaller sample sizes, lack of randomised control trials, and a gap in reporting intervention qualities and outcomes. Nevertheless, 360° immersive video is a viable alternative to VR and regular video, it is cost-effective, and although more robust research is necessary, learning outcomes are promising. Future directions: Future research would do well to focus on interactivity and application of pedagogical theory within immersive 360° videos experiences. We argue that more and higher quality research studies, beyond the scope of medical education, are needed to explore the acceptability and effective implementation of this technology. Keywords: 360° videoing, 360° videos, Head mounted display, Health and social care education, Immersive technology, Literature review, Pedagogy, Training, Virtual reality, VR *Correspondence: School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast, 6 College Park, Belfast, Northern Ireland Background Educating and training students to work in health and social care settings is both complex and nuanced. Yet with chronic underfunding in areas, such as staff development and retention, mounting staff shortages [1] and the continuing fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, it has never been more important to ensure a healthy © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Blair et al. BMC Medical Education (2021) 21:590 pipeline of well prepared and trained health and social care staff. The Commission on the future of the NHS after COVID-19 [1] state that more proportional training funds must be allocated to create enhanced opportunities and all workers should have access to opportunities for education, career progression, and professional development. It’s evident that failure to invest in the appropriate training of staff have clear implications, namely, staff attrition is likely to be higher and outcomes for service users more likely to worsen [2]. The scarcity of training and professional development for some staff groups is noteworthy, for example only 5% of the Health Education England budget is currently allocated to training clinical and non-clinical support staff [3]. Furthermore, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing measures to control infection rates, those in health and social care education have seen a dramatic decline in their faceto-face exposure to all aspects of their training creating additional barriers for educators [4]. Consequentially, there are renewed calls for innovative, solution focused thinking in order to maximise the potential offered to us by new and emerging technologies. As training in certain health and social care settings has been restricted, educators have to be responsive and adaptive in preparing professionals and students for ‘real world’ practice [5–7]. As such, the need for and interest in high-fidelity, simulation-based learning has significantly increased [8–10]. One group of technologies that are starting to show promise in the area of health and social care education are ‘Immersive technologies’. Immersive technology is defined as a set of interfaces, applications, and software that create augmented simulations for experiences and perfect interactions between human beings and technology [11]. These include Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and 360° videos. VR and AR are two of the most popular technologies used within this space however production costs are higher therefore issues remain regarding their accessibility within educational settings. Although hardware costs and requirements have steadily declined over the years [12], a recurring challenge is related to the costs and complexity involved in the production of highly realistic and customisable environments. VR and AR either require a high level of programming skills and effort or significant financial means to outsource these efforts [13]. MR is a new pedagogy that involves both physical and virtual elements including both learning content and making use of effecti (...truncated)