Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Establishment of Requirements for a 3D Interactive Virtual Training for Teachers

Simulation-based training systems have proven effective in a variety of domains, both for facilitating the learning of skills as well for applying this knowledge to real life. Although difficulties managing students' disruptive behavior in classrooms has been identified as one of the main causes of teachers' turnover, only a handful of virtual training environments have focused on providing training to teachers, and still no clear methodologies exist for their design, their implementation, nor their evaluation. In this article we discuss the methodologies employed by an interdisciplinary team of computer science and education researchers involved the development of the first of four iterative, increasingly sophisticated, prototypes of a web-based 3D Interactive Virtual Training Environment for Teachers (IVT-T). IVT-T simulates students with disruptive behaviors that teachers can interact with in a 3D virtual classroom, which provides teachers practice in managing classrooms, as well as feedback and reflection opportunities about their classroom behavior management skills. We currently describe the processes we conducted to derive the main system requirements for IVT-T 1.0 (the system is still evolving), which led to our suggestions for general requirements, in addition to the next lifecycle steps we identified for the successful implementation of the final system.