The University of Newcastle is training future speech pathologists with virtual reality (VR), allowing students to immerse themselves in real-world scenarios, such as virtual clinics assessing children’s speech and practical training environments.
Joanne Walters, lecturer of speech pathology at The University of Newcastle told Digital Nation about its digital learning experience which allows students to gain experience working with children.
“For us in speech pathology, our students go out on clinical placements during their program.
“We had this problem that we were teaching them how to do what we would call an oral musculature assessment, which is when they would look in a child’s mouth at the structure and function of the mouth.
“When we were teaching students this skill in second year before they would go out on placement and work with children, we were giving them a lot of content and a lot of knowledge, but we were just getting them to practice on each other,” Walters said.
But the oral anatomy of an adult is “very different” compared to a child, so students “weren’t getting a good opportunity of what it would look like”.
With the university outgrowing “traditional teaching”, Walters said since roughly 2019 “the university had been looking at different ways to do things, and virtual reality was one of those things”.
“We applied for a project grant and were successful and they put us in contact with Start Beyond and they talked through the different options that we might have with virtual reality.
“Students could practice the oral musculature assessment on children before they went out into the real world and practising that on real children.
“Virtual reality has allowed us to have a more immersive, but also a more realistic experience for our students.”
According to Walters, students can now gain confidence when heading out into the field.
“Speech pathology students when they start here at the university, almost have a particular profile.
“Often, they’re really into technology and gaming and those sorts of things. One of the aspects of using the technology for our students is that it is something that’s fairly new and fairly innovative for them to use, but it’s a technology that’s starting to be used clinically,” Walters said.
According to Walters, in clinical practice, speech pathologists are now looking to see how the technology might be used, leading the university to provide “some exposure to virtual reality and what it could do”.
It also offers student practice in interacting with young kids as some reported feeling “worried about working with children”.
“The students put the headsets on and they’re in that immersive experience where they’re in a clinic room, there’s a child in front of them and there’s two different children that they can choose from.
“There’s a four-year-old and a six-year-old. They choose the child that they want to work with. They’re immersed in this oral musculature assessment, so they’re going through the procedure.”
Walters said work began around 2020 with roughly 25 students, with surveys showing participants found the technology engaging.
“Initially our students went, ‘This is cool.’ They were very taken with the technology. That was a good outcome to start with, even if it wasn’t any different than the way we were teaching it before, they were really engaged.
“Then when they went through the procedure and … they started to go, ‘Wow, this is great because I can almost control my own learning’.”
With students enjoying the VR studies, Walters said next steps include building out learning modules.
“We’re in the process of developing a second module and so the first module was the students’ learning the procedure of an oral musculature assessment.
“This second module is exciting; is it’s looking at the different variations in anatomy that a speech pathology student might see when they look in a child’s mouth.
“We have got some children with different variations. One of the children has got a tongue tie, so they can’t protrude their tongue beyond their lip. Another child has a high palate and when you look in their mouth behind their teeth, it’s quite high and vaulted, and another child has enlarged tonsils.”
She pointed to the importance of industry partnerships when creating content for university students.
“What we’re looking at is that it is important to look at different ways of teaching our students.
“I think we’re starting to see students coming into tertiary education looking very different than they did, say, 15 years ago when I was first teaching.
“I feel that our students are wanting more from that learning environment and looking at different ways to learn.
“Being able to explore other ways of teaching and student learning has been really useful. As an end user of virtual reality, certainly think it is something that we should be continuing to do.
“Certainly, that partnership with industry, um, from a university perspective has been really useful,” Walters said.