Home visits are a key part of a social worker's life, but are notoriously hard to train for. Whilst roleplay can help the fact that the role-play is typically done in the classroom loses the immersion, and its only available when the course sets it up. Creating a home visit in VR eliminates both these issues - offering full immersion and 24/7 learning.
Over the last year we've been helping researchers at the Open University build a home visit learning experience for their social work students, so that the students can work through a typical home visit (with support case notes and messages from colleagues) to try and work out what is going on.
The students get to talk to the mother, father and two of the children. Whilst we've used audio as well as text for the dialogues so that students can better judge emotional cues we've also implemented an "emotional barometer" alongside the chat to make plain text chat sections more able to convey the same sort of information.
You can read more about the project by downloading the case study.
