Inclusive Virtual Reality in Education: Beyond the Headset (OUP ELTOC 2025)

I always wondered how and when I could submit a proposal as ELTOC speaker for Oxford University Press English Language Teaching. I thought I must be missing the calls for proposals. This year, I was invited as a speaker at ELTOC, Chapter 11 on 17th October, 2025. So that’s how it works ◡̈

Top-notch presenter support from the ELTOC team

The conference planning and organisation positively impressed me. But what distinguished ELTOC from other conferences for me is their support and guidance:

• helping me decide on the title and abstract (including SEO)
• providing feedback on my slides
• providing visuals for social media posts
• scheduling a tech check-in session
• a check-in just before the actual talk.

And when I got disconnected for a few minutes, they handled the situation very professionally, so I felt relaxed about it.

Large audience without losing audience interaction

Despite the short internet hiccup towards the end of my talk, I thoroughly enjoyed myself during my webinar. I thought I’d be nervous with around 3500 attendants, but for some reason, it still had the feel of a workshop. I was able to interact with the audience through the chat box. This meant, I could ask questions, see the audience’s responses and comment on them. This made me feel connected. The only difference to a small audience was how fast the chat flowed. But this was a sign that the participants were engaged. And the ELTOC team had told me during the tech check-in session how to deal with this, so I was prepared ◡̈

Immersion and learning gains in VR do not depend on a VR headset

My main aim with this webinar was to change the limiting, exclusive, technology-centred perception of virtual reality. I wanted to show that immersion and learning gains do not only depend on the technology. There are many other factors that play an important role in how immersed you feel in VR and how much you learn.

‘… thoughtful use of social and narrative immersion in lesson design can more than compensate for the lower level of technical immersion.’ (p. 23)

Kern, N. & Novash, M. (2025). The A-Z of Immersive Language Learning and Teaching in Virtual

Here is the abstract of my talk

An inclusive definition of Virtual Reality can help more educators make use of the many benefits of immersive language learning for their learners. This session will look at what Virtual Reality entails in its different forms and how taking a broader approach can make this technology more widely available. It will  then discuss some of the main benefits of immersive language learning with VR, and close with some practical examples.

All about Immersive language learning and teaching in virtual reality

You can only say so much during a 60-minute talk. I focused on the main message (see above) I wanted the participants to take away from this talk. I wanted participants to understand the benefits but also the risks when using VR, most of which are related to the VR headset. Because I had to keep this really short but there was a lot to say, I provided a free download of an extract on health and physical issues from our book The A–Z of Immersive Language Learning and Teaching in Virtual Reality. However, as you can see from the slide, there are many other risks that teachers and learners should be aware of. We go over these in detail in our book.

Of course, there are ways to circumvent or overcome these issues, so that we can make use of the many unique, research-backed benefits that VR offers to language learners. These are also discussed in the book.

One of the reasons for writing the book was to provide hype-free, research-based and pedagogy-focused information about virtual reality in language learning in one place, written by language learning and immersive (VR) learning experts.

We would like as many educators and VR edtech companies as possible to benefit from this book. Therefore, we provide different channels to buy the book, and offer an automatic discount of up to 60% in certain regions for the ebook on Gumroad.

ELTOC webinar recording & visual summary

My colleague and friend, Konstanze Kampfer, created this beautiful visual summary of my talk.

Questions & Answers

The chat was buzzing and there were a lot of comments and questions. But as I lost a couple of minutes do the disconnection, I wasn’t able to answer many questions or engage with the comments. If you had a question and didn’t get an answer, let me know. I might write a blog post answering these questions.