Virtual Omnibus Lecture: Investigating the Effects of Varying Lecturer Avatars as Environmental Context on Audience Memory

Abstract

We propose a novel form of remote lecturing, Virtual Omnibus Lecture, in which one lecturer gives a lecture by changing his/her virtual avatars, giving students the experience of being lectured by multiple lecturers. Because previous studies have shown that learning in various environmental contexts can improve memory performance, we posit that learning from various lecturers virtually can have a similar effect. To examine this concept, we divided a 90-minute lecture into four sessions and conducted a between-participant experiment to compare the four-avatar condition, where the lecturer taught using avatars with different appearances for each session, to the one-avatar condition, where the lecturer used a single avatar through all sessions. The results showed that the comprehension testing scores after the lecture were significantly higher for the four-avatar condition than for the one-avatar condition. This result suggests that multiple avatars provide a promising education method beyond traditional in-person/online lectures.