Failure and success in using mozilla hubs for online teaching in a movie production course

Paper in proceeding, 2021

In the autumn 2020 the course Digital Movie Making was given in a fully online mode, due to the restrictions and lockdowns related to the covid-19 pandemic. With the intention of avoiding Zoom fatigue and provide a more creative and engaging online teaching environment, the social VR platform Mozilla Hubs was chosen for all the lectures, seminars and supervision. The two main reasons for choosing Mozilla Hubs were the openness of the platform, providing wide opportunities for creating and setting up your own virtual space, as well as the option to access the platform via a web browser. However, Mozilla Hubs has a number of usability and technical flaws, making it clumsy to use, and the initial course introduction and guest lecture suffered severe technical issues when all 25 students attended simultaneously. A decision was made to only use Mozilla Hubs for supervision, and these meetings with few students turned out successful. Based on the observations from these learning activities, a number of advantages and disadvantages with VR in general and Mozilla Hubs specifically is presented and discussed.