Virtual Reality (VR) technology to support student mobility between Scotland and China

In 2019 the University of Dundee was awarded a grant through the British Council’s UK-China Outward Mobility International Partnership (OMI) Fund. The Fund supports mobility projects between the UK and China to grow scale and impact through capacity building and sharing best practice.

Partnering with the University of Wuhan (WHU), the University of Dundee designed a studio exchange for twenty-two undergraduate architecture students from Dundee. The group travelled to Wuhan in 2019 and took part in a two-week architecture project to work alongside WHU students on an important area of Wuhan’s old city. The exchange was highly successful and was due to be repeated in 2020 alongside a summer workshop. However, due to Covid-19, the programme has now been re-designed with a new virtual model.

The shift from physical to virtual mobility

To maintain the dialogue between students and staff in Wuhan and Dundee, this summer we are running an online academy. Fifteen students from Dundee will work with 30 architecture students in Wuhan on a design research project called ‘Village Life: Real, Virtual and Imagined’ which will look at new housing in the Chinese countryside. The academy will also provide a mixture of practical design workshops, lectures and masterclasses across a period of two weeks.

The Academy will be open to undergraduate students in Dundee and our afternoon lectures (evening in China) will be public events. To accommodate the time difference, the workshops will be delivered as a relay, with a joint discussion led by Dundee staff in the mornings followed by Wuhan staff in the afternoons. Some events will be held in person in China and the UK whilst others will be held on Zoom.  Wuhan is no longer operating under COVID restrictions so students will work in their campus studio each day.  Dundee students will meet in person for training in using the Virtual Reality (VR) equipment. There will be a final exhibition of work live in Wuhan, and then in person at the beginning of the next academic year in Dundee.  

As part of the design research project, students will explore the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) technology which will allow pairs of students located in China and the UK to share the experience of visiting the villages where the new housing will be built. We are working with Edify, a technology company working with universities, to get the most from VR technology; we will use it to share site information with our Chinese counterparts. Students and staff in Wuhan and Dundee are very excited to learn more about this technology and how they can continue to collaborate effectively despite the ongoing travel restrictions.

Addressing common challenges between Wuhan and Dundee

No matter which country you are you in, Covid-19 has encouraged us all to think again about the relationship between home and work and the possibilities for working remotely. By continuing to deliver this exchange programme remotely, students and staff will share their insights on this topic and explore the possibility of a new relationship between the city and the countryside, and explore what a new kind of ‘village life’ might look like. The regeneration of the countryside is a complex question which is currently exercising the imagination of many of China’s leading architects, planners and thinkers. It is also a question that has confronted architects working in the remote areas of Scotland. This project brings together practitioners from the UK and China to share their insights and ideas on overcoming some of these challenges. 

In the long term, we want to embed the exchange in our teaching, and we hope to identify sponsorship to help us sustain this mobility initiative beyond the funded period. We plan to invite potential sponsors to the summer events, including government bodies interested in building industry links with China and China-based international architecture and planning practices. We hope to secure sponsorship that will continue to support student travel in the coming years, for example through travel bursaries and flight sponsorships.

Overcoming technological issues

Although we have become much more innovative in how we deliver a successful mobility programme remotely, it has not been without challenges. We have mastered Zoom and Miro (a visual online collaboration platform) and use WeChat for informal communications with our counterparts in Wuhan. However, teaching Design courses remotely is difficult when you don’t have face to face contact, and work with people from different cultures. We are supporting Wuhan students who will be working together in their studios and encourage shared tasks and communication despite the different time zones. We will hold an online studio each day using Zoom, which works well for reviews and presentations. In addition, we will pair up a UK student with a Chinese student and encourage them to connect informally via WeChat. There will be one or two organised informal social events where the students are invited to exchange ideas and stories about each other’s language, favourite books or buildings. 

We are exploring the best way to capture everything that happens during the online academy in a blog style website, including videos of conversations between staff, students and external speakers. This will require a lot of technical support to set up, for which we are considering WordPress, with ongoing support from our university IT team once it has been set up.

The work from the Wuhan Academy will be exhibited at the end of August 2021 online and in person in Dundee when students return to campus in September 2021. Despite the physical distance, dialogue between leading architects, staff and students in China and Scotland is ongoing.

Key takeaways

• Virtual mobility programmes need to be flexible and take into consideration different time zones.
• Utilising a range of online platforms (Zoom, Miro, WeChat and WordPress) offers multifaceted communication and reduces reliance on one form of technology.
• Make use of innovative technologies such as VR to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration and bring remote teaching to life. 
• Identify potential sponsors in your sector who can support longer-term sustainability of mobility initiatives.  

Author:

Dr Penny Lewis, Wuhan Programme Lead, Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Dundee