Study-abroad students get a virtual encounter with South Korea

Visiting another country for the first time can be disorienting, even if you speak the language. That’s why the Center for Languages and International Communication(CLIC) holds an exhaustive daylong orientation for students spending the summer in one of the Rice in Country study-abroad programsto answer a variety of cultural and communication questions ahead of the trips.

Students heading to Korea this summer with lecturer Jayoung Song experienced part of their trip ahead of time in VR. (Photo by Katharine Shilcutt)

On April 23, faculty and staff from CLIC and the Student Wellbeing Office — as well as Rice students who spent last summer abroad — gave informative presentations to the 85 undergrads heading to six different countries after commencement in May. The topics ranged from how to be a polite guest in a host family’s home to the best way to document the journey on video.

For the 16 students heading to Seoul, South Korea, Jayoung Songoffered something even more immersive: a series of virtual reality (VR) presentations that showed her students how to use public transit, where to find utensils when dining in restaurants (in a drawer at your table), how to shop at a supermarket and how to order food. Song, a lecturer of Korean, conducted a breakout orientation session in which her students snapped their phones into plastic VR headsets and watched in stereoscope as she took them along streets and through subway terminals using 360 videos she filmed last summer while leading her first study-abroad trip to South Korea.

“Last year, the orientation was not as exhaustive as this one,” said Song, “so some students mentioned that, ‘Oh, I feel like I’m not ready to go to Korea yet.’” And once there, they were still flummoxed by a few basics, such as using public transportation and finding food.

The Center for Language and Intercultural Communication hosted an immersive pre-departure orientation for students April 23. (Photo by Katharine Shilcutt)

“I had this idea to incorporate new technology to train my students,” said Song, who collaborated on the videoswith Chi Liang Yu, educational media designer for CLIC. “Chi Liang and I were talking about virtual reality and thought, ‘This is a really cool thing these days, so why not try it out?’”

Last year’s students mentioned to Song that using the subway system in Seoul was particularly perplexing, so she started there. Eventually, she filmed over 20 clips with a special VR camera that captures everything within a nearly 360-degree range, the cost of which was supported by a George R. Brown Teaching Grant and a Teaching Innovation Fund Grant. The clips are uploaded to YouTube, where a setting can be toggled to make the videos work with VR headsets, which cost $15 each. “It’s really affordable, so we bought a full 20-piece set for the entire class,” said Song, who is taking six additional students on the trip this summer, thanks to a recent $50,000 grant from SK Innovation.

Brown College freshman Vienna Wang grew up speaking Chinese at home, learning Japanese in school, watching Korean dramas and listening to K-pop with her friends. And while she found the landscape in the VR videos to be “really similar to other Asian countries,” Wang said the tour of Kyung Hee University — Song’s alma mater and the campus where the Rice group will study for six weeks — was very useful.

Each VR headset cost $15, allowing Song to equip all 16 of her students. (Photo by Katharine Shilcutt)

“I think it was interesting to know where the student center is, where the library is, where I can go to do other things,” said Wang, who just finished her first year of studying Korean. “That was helpful because I had been looking up the university online, but everything was in Korean, and I was like, ‘I can’t read that yet.’”

Jones College freshman Noah Ahmed took Spanish throughout school and was looking for a challenge when he signed up for his first Korean class. Now heading to Seoul May 21 for an even greater challenge, Ahmed said the videos helped establish some initial expectations for his trip.

“I felt that the experience itself was pretty immersive,” he said. “When I turned around, I felt like I was actually in that place. And I didn’t know they kept utensils in the drawer; that’s super interesting to me.”