Participatory research on using virtual reality to teach ocean acidification: a study in the marine education community

Abstract

Ocean Acidification (OA) is an emerging environmental issue that is still largely unknown to the public and in its infancy in terms of educational strategies. OA teaching material should address the specific challenges that educators face while building learners’ understanding of OA. The objective of this study is two-fold. First, we identified the barriers to teaching OA as experienced by formal and informal marine educators. Second, we provided educators an opportunity to experience virtual reality and discuss how it could serve as a tool for face-to-face and distance learning to address the identified challenges. The findings shed light on four overarching themes of challenges to teaching OA: lack of science literacy, unprepared education field, complex and invisible nature of OA and lack of personal connection with the ocean. Marine educators consider empowerment, perspective-taking and visualization as the three principal avenues through which virtual reality may contribute to mitigating the challenges to teaching OA.

Keywords:

• Virtual reality
• ocean acidification
• climate change
• technology uses in education
• environmental education

Introduction

The impacts of CO₂ emissions

The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the industrial revolution and is not stabilizing (NOAA, 2019). Climate change and ocean acidification (OA) are two environmental issues resulting from these emissions. OA is the ongoing decrease of the pH in the ocean leading to disruption of the marine ecosystem (Caldeira and Wickett 2003). The scientific community has been advocating for rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented societal changes to limit the negative consequences of these environmental issues (IPCC, 2018, IPCC, 2019).

Early on, the United Nations stated that education should play an essential role in the response to climate change (United Nations (UNFCC) 1992). Yet climate change education has not resulted in meaningful changes in greenhouse gas emissions (Hornsey and Fielding 2020). The lack of behavioural change that would lead to decrease in CO₂ emissions seems partly rooted in the polarization over climate change. Worldviews, ranging from individualistic to communitarian have been argued to be the most accurate predictor of climate scepticism. Research has shown that conservatives, a position rooted in individualistic values, tend to be more sceptical about climate change than liberals, leading to a polarization climate science acceptance (Kahan et al. 2012; Hornsey and Fielding 2020). Hornsey and Fielding wrote, “[…] climate science has been drawn into “culture wars” that define and exaggerate partisan divides on other issues such as abortion and gun control” (2020, 8). Another obstacle to behavioural change is the complexity of climate change science that is based on predictive models (Busch and Osborne 2014). The public has to reconcile conflicting input from science and from their daily experience of weather that often seems to go in opposite directions (Shepardson et al. 2012).

While the public know about climate change, it has been shown that the awareness of the public about OA is much lower (Capstick et al. 2016; Gelcich et al. 2014; The Ocean Project 2012). The fact that OA is currently unknown by the public might mean that it is not yet a politically-loaded issue and thus might offer an alternative pathway to informing the public about the urgent need to reduce CO₂ emissions without falling into the partisanship issues associated with climate change. Informing the public about OA increases concern about OA, however, polarization arises when OA is associated with climate change (Capstick et al. 2016). OA education could promote behavioural change around CO₂ emissions when presented separate from climate change.

While the consequences of OA are complex, its cause might be easier to grasp. It is based on the chemical reaction between CO₂ and seawater leading to a pH decrease. The relationship between CO₂ and OA is more straightforward than between CO₂ and climate change. In this way, using OA as a way to inform the public about the negative impact of CO2 emission might be more efficient since the cause of OA appears to be less complex than the cause of climate change.

Capstick and colleagues (2016, 766) argued that “a key task for climate science communicators—who have fairly naturally focused on more obvious impacts such as changes to weather patterns and global temperature—is to develop new materials and narratives explicitly incorporating OA.” Fauville, Säljö, and Dupont (2013) reviewed OA educational material such as hands-on or virtual experiments and podcasts, and called for further collaboration between researchers and educators to create relevant educational materials for OA. In order to address these calls for action, this study sheds light on what the main challenges to teaching OA are and how VR could mitigate the most serious challenges to teaching OA?

Providing information is not enough to trigger behavioural change (Bray and Cridge 2013; Clayton et al. 2015). Focusing on personal connection, relevancy and learners’ agency might be more efficient (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002; Bamberg and Möser 2007) as direct experience of an environmental issue is more powerful than second-hand information (Spence et al. 2011). While it would be impossible or dangerous to expose the public to the causes of climate change and OA in real life, virtual environments can offer a powerful alternative allow the public to experience the negative consequences of these environmental issues. For example, Zaalberg and Midden (2013) showed that a 3D simulation of a flood leads to significantly enhanced motivation to evacuate, buy insurance and search for information compared to less immersive educational experiences.

Virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) offers vivid virtual experiences that are psychologically impactful and perceived as real (Blascovich and Bailenson 2011). Equipped with a head-mounted display (HMD) and hand controllers, users are immersed in a three-dimensional virtual environment enhanced by stereoscopic sound and haptic feedback (a sense of virtual touch). VR creates psychological presence, a sense of being there (Heeter 1992; Slater and Wilbur 1997), that comes from the immersive VR tracking system that detects the user’s body movements and allows them to feel like their body is moving in the virtual world, and that the virtual world is reacting to their movement. This high level of presence makes VR an efficient way to treat phobias (Morina et al. 2015; Wolitzky-Taylor et al. 2008), post-traumatic stress disorder (Rizzo et al. 2015; Botella et al. 2015), and anxiety disorder (Opriş et al. 2012).

Use of online educational tools can lead to a lack of social presence and sense of community that results from insufficient connection between users and difficulty in perceiving them as real people (Song et al. 2004). Coyne et al. (2018) investigated the use of VR for team-based learning and revealed that a large majority of the participants felt strongly about taking more classes offering VR team-based learning. Other scholars have created applications to foster social presence and community between learners to overcome the challenges of distance education with promising results (Cortiz and Silva 2017). VR, which offers a greater feeling of immersion, has the potential to be an important tool for distance learning with isolated learners.

VR is a promising tool for perspective-taking tasks and fostering pro-social behaviours. Becoming someone of a different gender, ethnicity, generation, or socio-economic background in VR induces helping behaviour (Ahn, Le, and Bailenson 2013), decreases racial bias (Hasler, Spanlang, and Slater 2017), ageist bias (Oh et al. 2016), and promotes empathy and feelings of connection (Herrera et al. 2018).

Although there is a significant and growing body of research on the impact of VR on human behaviours, the field of environmental education and VR is at its infancy (Fauville, Queiroz, and Bailenson 2020). Existing studies indicate that VR has potential to promote environmentally friendly behaviour such as decreasing paper usage (Ahn, Bailenson, and Park 2014), water usage (Bailey et al. 2015) and meat consumption (Fonseca and Kraus 2016).

Ahn et al. (2016) were the first to explore how OA can be addressed in VR. They invited university students to participate in their study and designed two conditions. In the VR condition, participants embodied a piece of coral in VR and observed the impact of OA on their virtual coral body. In the control condition, the participants watched the same sequence of events on a computer screen. This study revealed a shorter temporal distance of OA for the participants in the VR conditions along with higher spatial presence and greater body transfer. However, participants in the VR conditions did not perceive greater involvement than the control participants nor had greater inclusion of nature in self measure (Ahn et al. 2016).

Another study looked into the use of VR for teaching about OA (Markowitz et al. 2018) where 270 participants in different learning settings experienced a VR activity on OA where they could physically move in the virtual underwater world. This study demonstrated enhanced knowledge, inquisitiveness and positive attitude after the VR activity. They also suggested that the learning effect would be linked to the physical exploration as they showed that the more exploration the participants engaged in, the greater change in knowledge they displayed. Markowitz and colleagues’ study (2018) will hopefully encourage new studies in this field. Currently, no investigations exist regarding educators’ opinions about the use of VR in OA education.

This study contributes to what Capstick and colleagues (2016) called a key task for climate science communicators: developing new educational materials and narratives incorporating OA. We also contribute to the emergent field of VR and environmental education by investigating the role of VR in OA education. To do so, we collaborate with marine educators, as suggested by Fauville, Säljö, and Dupont 2013 to understand the challenges they are facing when teaching OA, and the role VR can play in mitigating these challenges. Our research questions are:

• What are the main challenges to teaching OA?

• How could VR mitigate the most serious challenges to teaching OA?

Theoretical framework

Climate change and OA are contentious socioscientific issues rooted in science and lacking predetermined solutions (Busch 2016; Busch et al. 2019; Sadler, Barab, and Scott 2007). To engage with socioscientific issues, the public must be science literate. There are multiple frameworks for science literacy (Feinstein 2011; Halliday and Martin 2003). The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and and Medicine (2016, 1) states that “contemporary definitions of science literacy have expanded to include understandings of scientific processes and practices, familiarity with how science and scientists work, a capacity to weigh and evaluate the products of science, and an ability to engage in civic decisions about the value of science.” Developing solutions to socioscientific issues requires, in addition to science literacy, consideration of moral, political, ethical, social and economic dimensions.

Teaching socioscientific issues requires educators to take into account learners’ epistemic view as it influences how they react to scientific evidence that can support or counter their beliefs. Zeidler et al. (2002) showed that students with naive conceptions of science are inclined to distort or dismiss scientific knowledge to support already held opinions. It is important for learners to understand the empirical nature of science, from how scientists collect and analyse data, to how they make sense of them and discuss them in relation to the existing body of knowledge and how scientists base explanations and decisions on them.

Socioscientific issues include moral, political, ethical, social and economic dimensions. Sadler and Zeidler (2004) investigated the role of emotion during discussion around genetic engineering issues and highlighted the sense of empathy felt by the learners and how empathy guided the way learners make sense of the socioscientific issue. Zeidler et al. (2005, 368) argued, “Students possess diverse arrays of cultural experiences that necessarily contribute to the manners in which they approach and resolve controversial issues including socioscientific issues.” Similarly, educating the public about OA encompasses more than informing them about the related science. Addressing OA with the public should empower them to make judgments that take into account the science, the society they live in and their own identity. This approach can “serve as a foundation for the education of an informed citizenry who participate in the freedoms and powers of a modern, democratic, technological society” (Berkowitz and Simmons 2003, 117). This study adopts a socioscientific framework to explore how a blended lesson using VR can help students experience and perceive how marine scientists work and understand the science and social implications of OA.

Methodology

Design and procedure

This study uses a participatory method focusing on the knowledge held by marine educators concerning the challenges of teaching OA they are experiencing and their thoughts about how VR could help mitigate these challenges. This creates a shift from the traditional research approach that is about the participants, to a culture where the research is done with the participants (Bergold and Thomas 2012). Participatory methods empower communities to identify problems affecting them and to find solutions in collaboration with researchers.

We adapted the collective intelligence method that typically gathers stakeholders around complex issues for a one or two-day long consultation to create a framework for action (Warfield 1976). This method has been previously used to address issues such as world peace (Christakis 1987), governance of Native American communities (Broome 1995), and marine education in Europe (Fauville et al. 2018; McCauley et al. 2019).

Due to limited opportunities to gather marine educators for a day or two, we adapted the methodology and conducted most steps online while taking advantage of a marine educators’ conference to run a short face-to-face consultation. The study was comprised of five stages as described in Figure 1 and below. This study was approved by the Stanford University Administrative Panel on Human Subjects in Research (IRB-50265).

Figure 1. Overview of this study.

Stage 1: Challenge generation

The objective was to survey marine educators about the challenges they encounter when teaching about OA. As it was important to collect data from marine educators who had some pedagogical and content knowledge about OA, we clearly stated the focus on OA and the goal of the survey in the dissemination material and in the consent form that constitutes the first part of the survey. An online survey, hosted on the Qualtrics platform, prompted participants to generate up to five challenges to teaching OA, phrased as short sentences with starters such as “Inability to,” or “Lack of.” The participants were also required to write a clarification sentence to elaborate the meaning of each challenge. The limit of five challenges was motivated by the importance of having a short survey and avoiding discouraging participants with too many requests as participants were not compensated for their participation. At the end of the survey, participants were informed that Stage 4 and 5 of this ongoing study would take place at the National Marine Educators Association (NMEA) Conference in July 2019 and were invited to register to join these Stages. The survey, open for a month, was shared among the marine education community through social media, mailing lists and interest groups.

Stage 2: Challenge categorization

The objective was to reveal patterns emerging from the challenges collected in Stage 1. The challenges that did not answer the question were deleted and challenges containing more than one idea were split into individual challenges. Each challenge generated during Stage 1 was printed on an individual sheet of paper along with its clarification sentence. Challenges were arranged randomly in one large pile.

The categorization process was conducted over two days by four researchers in a large room with 20 posters boards. The researchers took the first eight challenges on top of the pile and hung each one separately on one of the poster boards. Then, one of the researchers took the next challenge on top of the pile of challenges, and read it out loud so that all the researchers had a common understanding of the challenge. Holding this challenge in their hand, the four researchers went in front of the board with the first challenges. They compared the challenge hanging with the one in their hand using a process of paired comparison. Any pairing decision required agreement of a majority of the researchers. If the researchers did not consider that the challenges on the first board and the one in their hand had commonalities, they went to the next board with the second challenge, and again discussed potential commonalities. If the challenge in their hand was not similar to any of the eight challenges on the boards, it was hung separately on another board. When the researchers agreed upon commonalities between the challenge in their hand and one of the challenges on a board, they posted them together, and repeated the process with the next challenge on the pile until all challenges were considered.

When five challenges were grouped together, they became a category that was given a descriptive title. By the end of the second day, all the challenges were categorized and each category was given a title along with a short description.

Stage 3: Challenge scoring

The objective was to rank the categories created in Stage 2 by severity. A second online survey, open for three weeks, was distributed to the marine education community using the same channels as the first survey. As a large number of categories were generated (see results), the survey presented a randomized subset of categories to each participant. Each category was presented with its title, description and 3 of its challenges. Participants scored how severe each category was on a scale from “Not at all a problem” to “Extremely serious problem.” Participants were invited to enter a raffle for a chance to win one of ten $20 gift cards. This survey also informed the participants about Stage 4 and 5 that would take place at the NMEA Conference in July 2019 and invited them to sign up for it.

Stage 4: Experiencing VR

In order to learn from marine educators how VR can mitigate educational challenges, it was essential that these educators had experienced an educational VR activity on OA. As VR is still an emerging technology, we could not assume that the participants have had any previous experience in VR and we decide to provide participants with this experience.

Our research team joined the NMEA Conference in July 2019 and invited the survey participants who sign up for the Stage 5 to experience a VR experience about OA. Other marine educators present at the conference were also invited to test the VR experience and informed about Stage 5 and invited to sign up for it. The VR experience on OA presented was the Stanford OA Experience (https://vhil.stanford.edu/soae/) developed in 2014 − 2016 by VR researchers at Stanford University and OA researchers at the Center for Ocean Solutions and the Hopkins Marine Station. The Stanford OA Experience has been shown to thousands of people, from students to US senators, filmmakers and professional athletes. It is available free on major VR platforms, and has been downloaded in over a hundred countries.

In this 6-minute narrated VR activity, the participant is transported into a traffic jam where they observe molecules of CO₂ coming out of a car tailpipe and rising in the air (Figure 2A). The participant is then transported to a boat to observe the CO₂ molecules combining with sea water molecules, making the sea water more acidic (Figure 2B). Then the participant lands on an underwater reef where natural underwater vents spew CO₂, making the reef more acidic. The narrator explains that this reef serves as a crystal ball through which scientists can see the effects of increased acidity on ocean ecosystems. The participant is transported again to a healthy reef where they play the role of a scientist measuring the health of the reef by counting sea snails. The participant grabs flags and explores the reef to place a flag next to each sea snail (Figure 2C). Finally, the participant is transported to an acidified reef and asked to count the sea snails. They cannot find any as this species cannot live in this environment (Figure 2D). The VR activity ends with the narrator calling for reducing CO₂ emissions. The participants experienced this VR activity using the head-mounted device HTC Vive (resolution of 1080 × 1200 and an update rate of 90 frames per second for each eye) and 2 hand-controllers (Figure 2 E, F).

Figure 2. A: CO₂ molecules spewing out of a car. B: CO₂ reacting with sea. C: Participant placing flags next to the sea snails on the reef. D: Acidified reef without sea snails. E, F: Consultation participants in VR.

Stage 5: Generating strategies

The goal was to discuss how VR could address the most severe challenges to teaching OA, as identified in the previous stages. This stage took place during the NMEA Conference in July 2019.

Participants were seated in small groups of three or four educators. Since the consultation took place at the end of the conference, most participants knew each other, creating a friendly and safe atmosphere for brainstorming and discussion. Each group was assigned one of the seven most severe categories of challenges. Focusing on the 7 main categories of challenges was motivated by practical constraints. Stage 5 was limited to two hours in order to not remove participants from the conference for too long. As we wanted to give time to each group to share their discussion with the whole group, we could not accommodate more than 7 groups as it would have significantly increased the duration of this Stage. Participants were asked to brainstorm for 30 min around the following prompts concerning their assigned category of challenges:

• In what way do you think virtual reality could help overcome [category of challenges assigned to their group]?

• If you could ask our designers to create content to overcome [category of challenges assigned to their group], what would that look like?

Finally, each group reported their brainstorming to the whole group, leading to comment, questions and further discussion.

Each participant received a $30 gift card. The small group discussions and the final whole group reporting were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim for further analysis.

Participants

In survey 1 (Table 1), about half of participants identified as informal educators and about a fourth (28.6%) identified as formal educators. More than half (respectively, 51.4% and 60%) taught middle and high school. Only few participants (2.9%) had not taught OA at all while a majority of the participants (70%) taught it a moderate amount or more. Some of the participants (7.1%) declared knowing only a little about OA. Fifty participants lived in the USA, while the other twenty were spread around the globe in countries such as South Africa, Portugal, Hong Kong, Chile.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics concerning the participants to Survey 1 and Survey 2.

	Survey 1 (N = 70)	Survey 2 (N = 123)
	%	%
What is your primary profession?
Formal Education	28.6	61.0
Informal education	41.4	22.8
Scientist	8.6	3.3
Students	2.9	2.4
Other	18.6	9.8
Who do you teach (select all that apply)?
Early childhood	18.6	14.6
Elementary school	37.1	21.1
Middle school	51.4	26
High school	60.0	61.8
Undergraduates/ community college	31.4	22.8
Educators	40.0	19.5
Graduate students	24.3	13.0
General public	N/A	29.3
Other	25.7	7.3
How much have you taught OA?
A great deal	14.3	6.5
A lot	14.3	12.2
A moderate amount	41.4	37.4
A little	27.1	35.0
None at all	2.9	8.9
How much do you know about OA?
A great deal	12.9	11.4
A lot	44.3	35.0
A moderate amount	35.7	42.3
A little	7.1	11.4
None at all	0	0

In survey 2 (Table 1) 104 participants came from the USA while the other were again from around the world. Over half of the participants (61%) identified as formal educators. High school students were the most frequently taught audience (61.8%). More than half of the participants (56.1%) had taught OA a moderate amount or more. Few of the participants (11.4%) knew only a little about OA. As surveys 1 and 2 were disseminated using the same strategy, we can expect that some marine educators participated in both survey although the lack of identifying information collected in the surveys, in order to respect participants’ anonymity, prevents us from the number of participants who took both surveys.

Twenty-three marine educators, representing all levels of formal education from elementary to university along with informal education and governmental agencies, participated in Stages 4 and 5.

Results

What are the main challenges to teaching OA?

The 269 challenges from survey 1 were grouped into 21 categories during Stage 2. These 21 categories are discussed under four themes created by the authors as an attempt to discuss commonalities instead of discussing each of the 21 categories separately, which would also present some length challenges. Figure 3 illustrates this.

Figure 3. Process from challenge to theme. The 269 challenges were clustered into 21 categories. Each category was placed under one of four overarching themes. To simplify the illustration, not all 269 challenges are represented and only a few arrows are represented. The top seven categories were used in Stage 5.

Table 2 lists the 21 categories from the most severe (on top) to the least severe (at the bottom) according to the summed percentage of participants ranking each category as “Serious problem” or “Extremely serious problem.” Each category shows its title, description and two challenges belonging to the category. Finally, the summed percentage of participants who ranked the category as “Serious problem” or “Extremely serious problem” is provided.

Table 2 . Overview of the 21 categories of challenges. The column “Category” provides the title of the category of challenges along with the theme the category falls under. Theme 1: Lack of science literacy amongst the public, Theme 2: The unprepared educational field, Theme 3: The complex and invisible nature of OA, Theme 4: Lack of personal connection with the ocean. The column “Description” provides a short description of what this category entails. In the column “Examples of challenges” are presented two representative challenges from this category. In the column “Seriousness in %” is given the percentage of participants who ranked the category as serious or extremely serious.

Category	Description	Examples of challenges	Seriousness in %
Invisibility of most OA consequences (Theme 3)	Impacts of OA go unnoticed by the public	Failing to convey the personal cost of OA: People need to be told the environmental if OA is ignored - e.g. reduced oxygen production and CO2 absorption by the ocean will reduce the breathability of our air and reduce biological productivity resulting in collapsed fisheries. OA has not had a big negative effect on society, so there is a lack of significance of the issue to some audiences: OA has not killed anyone nor has it caused the complete collapse of an ecosystem or large economic industry.	69.0
Difficulty to feel empowered to act (Theme 3)	Because OA is happening at a large scale people feel their actions are insignificant	The solutions can seem out of reach for an individual: Cutting carbon emissions can be a very daunting thought and hard to share how we can all make a difference together.   Keeping people motivated to change the trajectory: We have to be careful about painting a gloomy picture of the extent to which humans can change this course	68.1
Diffusion of public attention across numerous marine environmental issues (Theme 4)	OA is one threat out of many facing the ocean so it gets confused and unnoticed	There are so many problems facing the world ocean:When compared with visible plastic pollution, coral bleaching, or harmful algal blooms, the hidden nature of acidification makes it a harder sell than the more visible issues. Difficulties in relating to OA: OA may be more difficult for citizens to relate to when compared with other issues like overfishing.	65.9
Geographical barriers (Theme 4)	Physical distance from the ocean hinders making a personal connection with OA	Children who have never been to the ocean are less likely to understand why OA is a big deal: It's difficult to get kids in a lake-less, coast-less state to care about OA, as the impacts of OA don't make sense. People who do not dive on coral reefs may not feel connected to the resource: Hard to care for something you may initially know nothing about or have never experienced.	64.2
Lack of meaningful lab contents and resources (Theme 2)	Insufficient knowledge and equipment to conduct OA experiments	Inadequate infrastructure: While it’s possible to do simple hands-on experiments, more advanced training require access to seawater, good infrastructures, specific equipment (e.g. pH stat, CO2). Lack of biologically relevant experiments: It would be great to have a set of biologically relevant experiments to show the effect of OA.	62.2
Difficulty in visualizing OA (Theme 3)	Invisible nature of OA requires models and visualization	Abstract topic: OA is abstract, finding visual references can be difficult.  Limited access to seeing the changes in real time or first hand: Tt can be hard to imagine the time or significance of the change through photographs.	61.5
Complexity of the chemistry of OA (Theme 3)	Chemical processes of OA are complex and require an advanced understanding of chemistry	Complex topics: The chemistry that is behind OA can be hard to articulate to audiences with different knowledge. Its complexity: Many components of carbonate chemistry are changing, all of which could influence organism physiology.	61.2
Political biases and fake news (Theme 1)	Misportayal of OA, often for political purpose, misleads and confuses the public	Conservatives aren't convinced there's a problem – Politics: OA is related to use of fossil fuels and some people reject climate change and its "spin-offs." Students believe reports of OA as being fake news: With students having exposure to the Internet, they latch on to articles such as those expounding the OA theory as being fake, and not having direct access to my own specimens, sampling, testing and compilations, I can't prove the facts.	59.6
Educators lack pedagogical and content knowledge (Theme 2)	OA is an emerging, often educators do not have the knowledge or skills to teach OA	Lack of proper training for new educators: We only get 2 hours to teach incoming educators about OA and the corresponding lesson plans. Knowledge of teachers not up to date on OA: Educators didn't learn about it in their own education, and may not feel they understand it well enough to teach it.	56.8
Lack of ocean literacy (Theme 1)	Inadequate knowledge of the impact the ocean has on us and our influence on the ocean	Lack of awareness on how the ocean interferes with our lives: Things you do not know/are aware of, will not push you to action. Lack of appreciation of the marine environment: Lots of people don't appreciate the value that the marine environment provides and therefore have no motivation to try to care about OA.	56.3
Science standards in formal education (Theme 2)	Inadequate time to teach about OA in science standards	Fitting it into the NGSS curriculum: It's difficult to find a place in the school year to fit it in. There are so many important concepts and scientific skills students need. OA is a relatively new phenomenon: OA is not routinely accepted as an important topic/concept/phenomenon in the science education canon.	55.7
Lack of didactic resources (Theme 2)	Insufficient content relevant to different age groups with concrete examples of OA	Lack of recent research written in high school language: I am able to get recent articles on OA but it is time consuming to keep up with and academic journals are difficult for highschoolers.  Lack of diversity of examples: Examples on OA should be diverse and should include multidisciplinary topics, like oceanography, biology, paleontology etc.	54.4
Complex relationship between carbon footprint and OA (Theme 4)	People have difficulty connecting their everyday life with OA	Child’s inability to connect their carbon footprint with increased CO2 in the ocean: Carbon footprint is difficult for kids to understand, let alone link it to changes in ocean pH. Lack of understanding of the relationship between carbon footprint and OA: Students need to understand that activities that produce carbon impact the acidity of the ocean.	54.3
Difficulty in conveying the complexity and scale of OA (Theme 3)	OA is a global phenomenon, with multiple inputs and effects across time scales	Integrating the numerous factors that contribute to OA: The more factors that contribute to a problem, the harder it can be for students (especially middle school) to understand the problem and potentially how to solve it.   It's difficult giving the learner an appropriate sense of scale and complexity: Moving from micro phenomena to a large-scale global crisis is challenging.	53.8
Lack of science literacy (Theme 1)	The public often lacks scientific understanding to grasp OA	Differences in students’ base knowledge: Students have different levels of background knowledge. Many of the students are illiterate as far as analytics goes: They have had no experience in analyzing data and drawing conclusions from it.	53.6
Lack of interest and awareness in OA (Theme 4)	OA fails to interest the public due to the lack of perceived relevance and connection to daily life	Inability to interest people in the problem: The issue is a chemical one and some people think they couldn't understand it. Lack of enthusiasm for non-charismatic mega fauna: It's very hard to create enthusiasm about something that cannot be "dressed up" or made cute like a polar bear.	53.6
Difficulty to reach underrepresented audiences (Theme 2)	Teaching about OA does not escape the socioeconomic inequity prevalent in our society	Lack of diversity: Teaching people about science is dominated by white people. There is a lack of diversity in educators which leads to a lack of student interest. Representation is key. Field trips would exclude underrepresented minorities and non-traditional students: A class field trip to an ocean often not affordable to non-traditional, online and underrepresented students.	51.8
Lack of basic prior knowledge in chemistry (Theme 1)	Most individuals do not have chemistry base knowledge to understand OA	Lack of background chemistry knowledge: Most students don't have the chemistry base knowledge to understand how these molecules interact and change the ocean pH. Students have little prior knowledge: Many students have not been introduced to OA or have little chemistry background, so we need to start from the beginning.	50.6
Misconceptions about OA (Theme 1)	People form misconceptions about OA based on prior knowledge and misinterpretation	Misconceptions about scale and proportion: Many students view the ocean as too big to change and small changes on a pH scale appear to be insignificant. Students think someone is pouring acid into the ocean: Students usually hear the word acid instead of acidification and immediately think someone is pouring acid in the ocean.	50.5
Lack of accessible data (Theme 2)	Relevant data to teach OA is either hard to find, or nonexistent	Lack of local data: The most interesting data would be local, but that may not be available. Lack of easy to teach math units using OA data: I teach high school math and would like to connect my lessons to ocean data.	47.6
Uncertainty of science (Theme 1)	Science is inherently uncertain and this cause the general public to doubt the research	Limited understanding of the mechanisms of OA: More information may still be required to understand the mechanisms of OA in order to properly teach about OA. Uncertainty in impacts of OA: We still know relatively little about OA and how it will impact marine life.	39.5

How could VR mitigate the most severe challenges to teaching OA?

During Stage 5, each of the seven groups was assigned one of these seven categories of challenges:

• Group 1: Invisibility of most OA consequences

• Group 2: Difficulty to feel empowered to act

• Group 3: Diffusion of public attention across numerous marine environmental issues

• Group 4: Geographical barriers

• Group 5: Lack of meaningful lab contents and resources

• Group 6: Difficulty in visualizing OA

• Group 7: Complexity of the chemistry of OA

Short, easy to understand excerpts from discussions were chosen (and edited for readability) because they are representative of longer discussions in each group or in the whole group. Notes in parentheses from the authors are intended to facilitate the readers’ understanding. Participants have been anonymized by identifying as P1 (Participant 1) to P23.

Invisibility of most OA consequences

Participants suggested using VR to experience the impact of OA at three levels. First, learners could experience the impact of OA on jobs by virtually embodying a shell fisherman whose business is negatively impacted by OA as the animals they normally harvest and upon which their economic survival depend on are disappearing (Excerpt 1).

Excerpt 1

P3: I thought it would be useful, and would connect to some of the kids that are being taught, to create a visual representation of a shell fishery that would be negatively affected by your own self. Your business may be taken away because these animals that you harvest can’t form shells anymore.

Second, the user would virtually walk into a local seafood market and experience how the diversity of seafood would decrease due to OA, and not only for shellfish but also for predatory fishes that would be victims of the collapse of the food chain (Excerpt 2).

Excerpt 2

P2:You can have a student go to our local seafood market, or simulated seafood market, and show them what their options would be if we hadn’t lost fisheries. All those diverse predatory fishes that would be affected with these types of changes, they would be absent.

Third, they suggested that VR could display the consequences of OA on someone’s economy by showing species disappearing along with the prices in the seafood market going up (Excerpt 3).

Excerpt 3

P1:You are showing the trophic cascade over here. As things disappear you watch the prices in the seafood market, for certain things, go up as the availability goes down. Because if you throw money in there that is going to reach some more people.

Difficulty to feel empowered to act

Group 2 described the danger of presenting a doom and gloom picture and the importance of avoiding ending on a depressive note that can lead to feeling powerless and landing in a “What’s the point?” mind-set.

They suggested using VR to show different potential scenarios concerning the health of the environment based on the choice that we make. They discuss how the immersive nature of VR could help with a personal connection leading to empowerment and a feeling of being able to make a difference (Excerpt 4).

Excerpt 4

P4:I showed my kids (high school students) the movie An Inconvenient Truth and one girl was saying to me, “you can’t end on that depressive note with us. We’re 16/17 year olds; if we go out and think its doom and gloom what’s the point?” And that got me thinking that maybe you could use this VR to show different trajectories to model what the future can be with different scenarios. Because what I felt yesterday (when experiencing the Stanford OA Experience) was that it really affected me.

P6:I think you’re onto a good point. I think we’ve recognized the notion of being immersed and having a personal connection is what this technology provides. And now stay away from the gloom and doom notion of it and say, “okay well how do you empower people?” You empower people by saying, “maybe I can make a difference” and by showing options.

During the whole group discussion, participants discussed how, in VR, a user could go through a typical day and make everyday decisions while observing what it means in term of emissions (Excerpt 5).

Excerpt 5

P6: Telling the story about a day in the life of the Smith for example and looking at every decision that person makes through that day. What does that mean in terms of carbon emissions?

P1:I love the idea of the day of a life. If you have the people going through it and they’re actually physically shopping or physically turning the hot water dial so that each user’s experience is a little different.

Diffusion of public attention across numerous marine environmental issues

Participants reported that their category of challenge happens as a consequence of all the other challenges. For this reason, most of their strategies could be part of how to mitigate other categories of challenges (Excerpt 6).

Excerpt 6

P7:I think ours (challenge) is the pinnacle of all the others and it’s difficult to understand.

P9:Right.

P7:It’s far away. It’s all these other things that are on there (other challenges on the walls) and so this is what happens; there’s a lack of attention on this.

Geographical barriers

They suggested to virtually experience the underwater world in a way that is otherwise impossible (Excerpts 7 and 8).

Excerpt 7

P11: Even if you’ve been to the ocean you’ve not necessarily going deeper than this high (showing waist height) in the water, so VR takes you physically to places that you wouldn’t go.

Excerpt 8

P11: VR allows you to feel connected to it (the ocean) because you’re actually exploring the critters that are in it and you’re actually touching, actually collecting.

Participants discussed how one’s CO₂ emissions don’t only impact their local community but travel and impact other people. Group 4 suggested using VR to virtually travel with their emission and see their impact (Excerpts 9).

Excerpt 9

P10: It seems like you would also want to know where’s our carbon dioxide that we’re producing going? Right?

P11: Right, right.

P10: Jet streams probably carry some, weather patterns probably carry some. So students can go, “Oh, so some of my stuff from here is going over there.” So I think that would be really cool. Breaking down that barrier would be to connect to the environment a little bit more about where is that stuff going.

Lack of meaningful lab contents and resources

Participants considered OA hands-on activities as a potential source of misconceptions failing to communicate the slow pace of OA and the variation of responses amongst different organisms. They discussed using VR to avoid misconceptions (Excerpt 10).

Excerpt 10

P15: In the classroom when we try to show the shells dissolving, we might use a high concentration of acid and the shells are bubbling and decomposing. So we’re kind of artificially making it look like it happens that fast. So it’s much slower than that and it might not affect some shell organisms the same way than others. And so maybe virtual reality could do a better job of that, so that we’re not giving the kids the impression that, “whoa, everything’s melting,” ((laughter)) “everything’s dissolving right now” because you want a balanced approach. You don’t want to act like it’s dooms day.

They suggested that leaners could virtually embody a scientist working in this field and complete some of their work as a way of gaining a better understanding how the scientific method (Excerpt 11).

Except 11

P16: I thought that actually being underwater and collecting data was really powerful

P14: Yeah, very powerful.

P15: Like career oriented, and what does this job really entail, being under water?

P15: It introduces data collection. For students getting introduced to the science and engineering practices, it’s good to see that.

Difficulty in visualizing OA

Participants mentioned how the invisibility of the CO₂ molecules combining with sea water makes it difficult to understand OA. With VR, this process can become visible (Excerpts 12).

Excerpt 12

P19: In the VR headset, it was really helpful to actually see the molecules go out of the car, go up into the air and then come back down because you could see CO₂. It’s really hard to understand what that means, but seeing that it’s a gas floating and that it is fluid and that it can move, I think it’s really helpful even for adults that don’t necessarily understand what ocean acidification is or where it comes from.

Complexity of the chemistry of OA

Participants discussed how difficult it is for the public to understand that OA impacts shelled organisms amongst others. They suggested to use VR to dive into the molecular structure of the shell to see how the change in pH impacts it (Excerpt 13).

Excerpt 13

P21: Thinking about having a magnifying glass where you’re looking in like a microscope, right in the organism itself. So instead of just saying “here is a full shell organism, a snail, the one that has holes in it,” you could beam down right into what’s happening.

Another challenge is the complex logarithmic scale of pH. Participants believed that VR could help visualize how a small change in pH translates into an important increase in hydrogen ions (Excerpt 14).

Excerpt 14

P1:I feel like that could really help people to see that we are not talking about a small scale thing. Because students, in general, if they see a 7.9 versus a 7.8, their default is, “well, that’s a tiny tiny change.”

P2:So trying to understand the immensity of the actual problem.

P3:Yes, so you are saying that showing the molecules to show more of them in a given space.

Table 3 summarizes the strategies discussed by the participants and presented above.

Table 3. List of the strategies suggested by participants to help mitigate the seven most severe categories of challenges.

Categories of Challenges	Mitigation strategies
Invisibility of most OA consequences	Take the perspective of someone whose job is impacted by OA.
	Take the perspective of someone whose food choices are impacted by OA.
	Take the perspective of someone whose budget is impacted by OA.
Difficulty to feel empowered to act	Show different future trajectories of the environment depending on our CO2 emissions.
	Take virtual daily decisions and see their impact in term of CO2 emission.
Diffusion of public attention across numerous marine environmental issues	Address the other challenges as they see this one as a consequence of all the other categories.
Geographical barriers	Exploring the marine environment underwater.
	Follow your own CO2 emission and see where it goes and who it will have an impact on.
Lack of meaningful lab contents and resources	Avoid misconceptions brought by real hands-on activities.
	Step into the shoes of a researcher in OA to understand their career.
Difficulty in visualizing OA	Making CO2 molecules emission and combination with seawater visible.
Complexity of the chemistry of OA	Show the effect of OA on the molecular level of the animal's shell
	Visualizing how a small difference in pH mean in term of concentration of hydrogen ions.

Discussion

This study addresses two research questions: what are the challenges to teaching OA and how could VR mitigate the most severe challenges to teaching OA? The discussion is organised around these two questions.

What are the main challenges to teaching OA?

The two surveys and the categorisation session resulted in 21 categories of challenges presented in Table 2. We created four overarching themes that capture these categories and guide the discussion.

Lack of science literacy amongst the public

The public is confronted with a range of socioscientific issues about which they have to make decisions (such as decisions concerning vaccination or to best consume while being aware of the environmental impact) that require science literacy. Several categories of challenges to teaching OA reflect a lack of science literacy, since understanding OA depends on several fundamental scientific concepts.

The category “Lack of basic prior knowledge in chemistry” addresses the fact that the public’s limited understanding of basic chemistry impairs their ability to grasp the complex nature of OA. The category “Uncertainty of science” acknowledges that the uncertainty associated with the language of science can be interpreted by the public as unreliability. Scientists and the general population have different interpretations of probability. The public tends to interpret the likelihood of a given potential event as a much lower than what scientists intended. As stated by Busch and Osborne (2014, 29), “non-scientists tend to downplay the probability of events because of the cautious language used.” This decreases the perceived need to take action (Center for Research on Environmental Decisions 2009). The categories of challenges aforementioned are fertile ground for “misconceptions about OA” such as believing that chemical pollution or acid rain cause OA (Danielson & Tanner, 2015) that could emerge from prior knowledge or misinterpretation of new information and “Political biases and fake news” where misleading claims, for political purpose, would confuse the public. Another category of challenges in this theme is “Lack of ocean literacy” as Strang and colleagues stated that one cannot be science literate without being ocean literate (Strang, Schoedinger, and deCharon 2006).

The lack of science literacy alluded to in these categories aligns with previous research showing that 18% of the students graduating from high school reach the minimal level of science literacy (National Center for Educational Statistics 2006). The National Science Board (2018) also reported that Americans’ knowledge of basic scientific facts is incomplete and has not improved over the last two decades which makes it challenging for them to engage with socioscientific issues, such as OA, in a meaningful way.

The unprepared education field

The education field is currently struggling to effectively teach about OA. The category “Educators lack of pedagogical and content knowledge” highlights how educators themselves are not well-prepared to teach OA. The categories “Lack of meaningful lab content and resources”, “Lack of accessible data” and “Lack of didactic resources” highlight the lack of tools available to educators. The challenge also comes from the “Science standards in formal education” that do not allow enough time to address OA in school. Another category of challenges addresses the “Difficulty to reach underrepresented audiences” as the field of OA education does not escape the racial and socioeconomic inequity prevalent in science education in general (Beasley and Fischer 2012).

Fauville et al. (2018) studied the challenges to teaching about the ocean in Europe and highlighted similar challenges to the ones revealed in this study. OA education clearly needs to be addressed not as an isolated problem in marine education but as a case study of a general problem that prevents marine education from reaching its full potential.

The complex and invisible nature of OA

The categories of challenges falling under this theme are “Difficulty of visualizing OA”, “Complexity of the chemistry of OA,” “Invisibility of most OA consequences,” and “Difficulty in conveying the complexity and scale of OA” all leading to “Difficulty to feel empowered to act” as learners might not understand how their action can have a significant impact on OA.

OA can be considered a complex system characterized by invisible dynamic processes, interconnections, heterogeneous components and multilevel organization for which the outcomes are not predetermined (Hmelo-Silver, Marathe, and Liu 2007; Wilensky and Resnick 1999). Making sense of complex systems requires building a representation of the different components of the systems which requires cognitively demanding abstract thinking (Hmelo, Holton, and Kolodner 2000). Jacobson and Wilensky (2006, 21) highlighted that “there are many complex phenomena for which classroom observations are impractical, unhelpful, or even impossible, such as phenomena that occur over very large or very small scales in time or in space.” One strategy to learn about complex systems resides in using computational simulations enabling visualization of the invisible aspects along with making the different scales visible (Jacobson and Wilensky 2006; Wilkerson-Jerde and Wilensky 2015). Another strategy is to actively engage the learners by situating the complex phenomena in the learners’ everyday contexts (Wilensky and Stroup 2002). As argued by Jacobson and Wilensky (2006), participatory simulations happen when “students in a classroom act out the roles of individual system elements and then contrast and compare the results of the students’ actions in the classroom system with the behaviour of the complex everyday system” (17).

Lack of personal connection with the ocean

The category “Geographical barriers” poses a challenge as the distance between the public and the ocean hinders individuals from making a personal connection with OA. Longo and Clark stated, “the ocean is commonly viewed as something far removed from human society. In some way, it is deemed ‘out of sight, out of mind’” (Longo and Clark 2016, 465). This goes along with a “Complex relationship between carbon footprint and OA” as people have difficulty connecting their everyday life with OA. This leads to a “Lack of interest and awareness in OA” and “Diffusion of public attention across numerous marine environmental issues” as OA is not perceived as relevant and connected to our everyday life and is unnoticed compared to other marine issues. The lack of relevance of the marine environment for the public echoes a more general issue with science education and ocean literacy. Previous research has shown that science education is unpopular among students (Hofstein, Eilks, and Bybee 2011; Osborne and Dillon 2008). One reason for this dislike seems to relate to the irrelevance of science education for the students everyday life (Dillon 2009). To address this issue and support motivation to learn, there has been a call to make science learning more meaningful for students (King and Ritchie 2012). This call for action should also apply to OA and marine education.

How could VR mitigate the most serious challenges to teaching OA?

Stage 5 was organized around the seven most severe categories of challenges, and identified how VR could mitigate them. These strategies can be organised around three affordances of VR: perspective-taking, empowerment and visualization (Table 4).

Table 4. Overview of how the VR mitigation strategies align with the affordances of VR. P.T: perspective taking, E: Empowerment, V: visualization.

		Affordances
Challenges	Mitigation strategies	P. T.	E.	V.
Invisibility of most OA consequences	Take the perspective of someone whose job is impacted by OA.	X
	Take the perspective of someone whose food choices are impacted by OA.	X
	Take the perspective of someone whose budget is impacted by OA.	X
Difficulty to feel empowered to act	Show different future trajectories of the environment depending on our CO2 emissions.			X
	Take virtual daily decisions and see their impact in term of CO2 emission.		X
Diffusion of public attention across marine env. issues	Address the other challenges as they see this one as a consequence of all the other categories.
Geographical barriers	Exploring the marine environment underwater.		X
	Follow your own CO2 emission and see where it goes and who it will have an impact on.			X
Lack of meaningful lab contents and resources	Avoid misconceptions brought by real hands-on activities.			X
	Step into the shoes of a researcher in OA to understand their career.	X
Difficulty in visualizing OA	Making CO2 molecules emission and combination with seawater visible.			X
Complexity of the chemistry of OA	Show the effect of OA on the molecular level of the animal's shell			X
	Visualizing how a small difference in pH mean in term of concentration of hydrogen ions.			X

Perspective taking

VR could allow users to step into someone else’s shoes to experience the invisible consequences of OA. The user could become a person whose job, food choice and/or economy is impacted by OA. Perspective-taking activities could help the public understand how the ocean impacts their life on a daily basis. This could create a personal connection with the ocean while making the issue of OA relevant and interesting to the learners. Stage 5 participants also suggested using VR to step into the shoes of a scientist studying OA to mitigate the challenges linked to the limited level of science literacy among the public, by providing learners the opportunity to understand scientific practices and improve their epistemic knowledge.

Despite their recognised values of perspective-taking on learning, attitude and behavior (Sadler and Zeidler 2004), traditional perspective-taking activities also present challenges. Taking the perspective of another requires extensive cognitive resources (Zaki 2014). Also, by relying on the participants’ imagination, perspective-taking is impacted by the participants’ preconceptions and biases, leading to issues of experimental control (Blascovich et al. 2002). Some people might feel self-conscious while engaging in perspective taking in groups, leading to negative reactions (Vorauer 2013).

VR seems well positioned to address the barriers to traditional perspective-taking. Perspective-taking in VR is less cognitively taxing. Participants do not need to make the cognitive effort of imagining the situation as it is rendered digitally and surrounds the participant. This also means that all participants have the same perspective-taking experience as displayed by the VR activity. Oh and colleagues (2016, 400) postulated that, as people in VR “tend to be less ‘present’ in the physical world and more so in the virtual world, they may feel less self-aware when engaging in a perspective taking exercise.” According to the embodied cognition theory (Barsalou 2010), participants’ movements and the ability to interact in the virtual world could be beneficial for cognition as the physical movement helps the participants gather more perceptual information (Brisswalter, Collardeau, and René 2002). The efficiency of perspective-taking in VR has been demonstrated for promoting prosocial behaviour (Ahn, Le, and Bailenson 2013), reducing racial bias (Maister et al. 2013; Banakou, Hanumanthu, and Slater 2016), improving financial planning behaviour (Sims, Bailenson, and Carstensen 2015), decreasing prejudice (Oh et al. 2016), and improving attitude toward elderly (Yee and Bailenson 2009). Some studies have shown that perspective-taking in VR can have greater impact on attitude and behaviour than traditional perspective-taking (Yee and Bailenson 2009; Herrera et al. 2018). Participants also suggested that taking on the role of a scientist investigating OA has value related to career orientation. While embodying a scientist in VR, learners would experience the intellectual and affective work conducted by researchers, and how they study OA (Jaber and Hammer 2016). Perspective-taking, seems to hold a promising potential to contribute to teaching OA.

Empowerment

VR could empower learners by showing the impacts of their daily choices on the environment. A similar approach concerning water usage was investigated by Hsu, Tseng, and Kang (2018) and led to change in cognition and behaviour intention. Bailey and colleagues (2015) had similar results on hot water consumption where participants took a virtual shower and saw the amount of coal needed to transport and warm up the water they were using.

Participants also suggested empowering learners to virtually explore the underwater world. Previous research on the use of VR for OA education has shown that the exploration of the virtual marine environment positively correlates with the gain of knowledge on OA (Markowitz et al. 2018). This can be explained by the embodied cognition theory (Clark 1997) statin that being present and moving in a space helps one learn, and internalize information relevant with the context (Weisberg and Newcombe 2017). VR would give learners an opportunity to create a personal connection with the ocean for learners who might not have through real exposure.

Visualization

While one cannot observe the molecules contributing to OA or the large scale impact of OA, it is essential for the public to understand OA both at the micro and macro level. Participants suggested to use VR to visualize otherwise invisible aspects of OA. Suggested strategies ranged from showing potential future trajectories of the environment depending on our CO₂ emissions to visualizing the logarithmic pH scale.

Scholars, including medical researchers (Izard et al. 2018; Harrington et al. 2018) and environmental planners (Wiberg et al. 2019) have demonstrated the value of VR visualization.

For example, recall of information is improved when people are exposed to visual information in VR compared to desktop computer (Krokos, Plaisant, and Varshney 2019).

As described by El Beheiry et al. (2019, 1316) in VR:

“Objects can be observed from entirely arbitrary angles and vantage points, just as we observe them in the real world. Interaction using specialized VR controllers available with modern headsets can be performed with millimeter precision. This sense of realism translates to a fluid and natural-feeling experience for the user, in turn allowing otherwise complicated spatial tasks to be performed rapidly, often by orders of magnitude, compared to conventional mouse and monitor configurations”

VR has also been used to make chemistry more accessible by allowing learners to see atoms, molecules and bonds, and interact with them (Edwards et al. 2019). Researchers have noted the positive impact of VR on chemistry learning and motivation to learn (Ferrell et al. 2019). Similar gains could be expected related to teaching OA.

VR makes visible invisible phenomenon, allows learners to manipulate visible information and facilitates the integration of this new knowledge with previous conceptions and schemas more efficiently than with traditional visualization tools.

Limitations and path forward

This study contributes to the need to improve and enrich OA education. We adopted a participatory approach to investigate the challenges to teaching OA and scrutinize how VR could contribute to mitigating these challenges. The main themes emerging from these challenges are (i) the complex and invisible nature of OA, (ii) the unprepared field of education, (iii) the lack of science literacy amongst the public and (iv) the lack of personal connection with the ocean. According to marine educators, three affordances of VR, perspective-taking, empowerment and visualization, could be at the core of various strategies to mitigate the challenges to teaching OA.

A limitation from this study is that most participants were from the US. We cannot exclude the possibility that the challenges revealed and their seriousness might be culture-specific. For example, in a country with a different education system, marine educators might not see the field of education as unprepared to tackle OA. Moreover, the lack of personal connection with the ocean that was highlighted in this study, might look very different on an island nation where the ocean might be more integrated in their everyday life, and culture. These are important questions that need to be addressed. We encourage the ocean literacy community to explore similar research questions in other part of the world in order to have a better sense of how VR can help mitigate the challenges to teaching OA in different regions. While we cannot claim that similar challenges would be found anywhere else, an earlier study highlighted similar challenges to this paper. Fauville et al. 2018 investigated the challenges to teaching about the ocean across 9 European countries. Their highlighted eight themes of challenges that overlap with ours. For example, they stated that “the very nature of the ocean makes it difficult to experience or understand’, a similar idea to our theme “complex and invisible nature of OA”. They also shed light on the weak connection between humans and the ocean with challenges such as “Inability to show the importance of the ocean in our daily lives” and “the lack of personal experience in the ocean” which address a similar issue than the “lack of personal connection with the ocean” highlighted in this paper.

More research is also needed on how VR could be best used in combination with existing teaching practices in order not only to understand what impact VR can have on its own but how can VR be efficiently integrated in larger lesson plans or learning experiences. Future research would also need to address the role played by different affordances of VR such as haptic feedback or how experiencing VR activity alone or in group impact the outcomes.

It is important to note that the participants did not consider VR as a silver bullet. They discussed how VR should be used in combination with other teaching practices such as data analysis in the classroom, blending the virtual world with the real one. They highlighted that if something can be experienced in real-life, there is no need to use VR. This call to keep VR for activities that cannot be experienced otherwise resonates with Bailenson’s argument (2018) that VR thrives for experiences that are dangerous, impossible, counterproductive or expensive.

Participants agreed that VR is not the only tool allowing visualization. For some of the challenges, 2D visualization on a desktop works as well, reminding us again to use VR for instances where other teaching tools cannot deliver the same experience. This last argument is key in light of research on conceptual learning in VR that is inconclusive concerning the efficiency of VR compared to other media (Queiroz et al. 2020). Some studies report better learning outcomes in VR compared to other media; other studies find opposite results. Makransky, Terkildsen, and Mayer (2019) found that while students felt more present when using a high-immersion VR science lab, they learned less compared to a similar lab simulation on a desktop. On the other hand, Alhalabi (2016) found that participants who learn about various topics such as astronomy and transportation in VR conditions scored higher on quizzes than participants learning the same concepts in a control group using no VR technology. The findings’ discrepancy from previous studies about learning gains in VR aligns with recommendations from participants that VR should be kept for specific teaching purposes and should not replace existing, effective teaching activities.

The findings of this study contribute to what Capstick and colleagues (2016) see as a key task for climate science communicators, namely developing new materials and narratives explicitly incorporating OA. The results of this study will hopefully help inform the design of future educational materials and provide concrete strategies to using VR for OA education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.