Craig Frehlich
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[00:00:00] Shannon Putman: Welcome everybody to another fantastic episode of Putin's podcast Pops. I am here with the fabulous Craig Relic. I cannot wait to get right into it. So, Craig, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:13] Craig Frehlich: Thank you for having me on the show. I am so excited.
[00:00:18] Shannon Putman: I could not be more excited, and I did wanna just give you a shout out because you were the first person to ever have me on a podcast. So to be able to return the favor is just incredibly awesome.
[00:00:29] Craig Frehlich: Not only that, I've had you twice, so yeah.
[00:00:32] Shannon Putman: I'm a double guest. I think that means I'm special. Well, let's get right into it. I kind of wanted you to just introduce yourself and maybe give us a little insight into what got you started onto your VR journey.
[00:00:44] Craig Frehlich: Yeah. So, first and foremost, I've been happily an educator for like 30 years in the classroom. You know, doing what I feel is probably the most important part of teaching and that is trying to find ways to garner engagement. Attention for students because the hardest part about learning is if you can deliver content all you want, but if no one's going to pay attention to it, then it's all for lost.
[00:01:15] Craig Frehlich: And so I've spent a ton of time in my career just trying to figure out ways to use technology. Get students to lean into their learning. And the last 10 years have been looking at the efficacy of using virtual reality as one such tool.
[00:01:36] Shannon Putman: And I love that you mentioned efficacy. Are there any certain issues that you're finding that might prevent people from being willing to explore this new technology?
[00:01:46] Craig Frehlich: Yeah. You know, like a new tech tool. It's, you know, we can go back to a textbook and there's actually a funny little clip. You could probably find it on YouTube way back in like the Monk days, where this monk calls in help and he's got a book in front of them, in front of them, and. It's like the i the IT help desk from the past.
[00:02:08] Craig Frehlich: And he doesn't know how to open up the book 'cause it's so new to him. And so the IT person shows him how to open the book. He's used to scrolls. Back in the day, scrolls went this way. And so he's like, okay. And then he didn't know how to read from left to right. And then they close up the book and the guy leaves.
[00:02:25] Craig Frehlich: He is like, quick, it's all gone. The information's gone. So nowadays VR is like that. I think we assume like a book, we can just give it to a teacher and the students and they can just start reading and learning from it. And it's not that case. It's like when books first came out you need some support and help.
[00:02:47] Shannon Putman: I absolutely love that analogy and I might have to steal it. And I will give you credit of course, but that's the whole point of what I've been saying. The industry feels like it needs to be plug and play, and I just do not think that is a sustainable way to integrate technology fully into the curriculum.
[00:03:05] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, well said. And moreover to that, Shannon, as an educator yourself the other piece to the puzzle that I think, you know, will help our industry is how we learn is key to how we use vr. You know, there's some fundamental principles like when we teach something. We don't just teach it as a one-off. We have a journey, a learning journey.
[00:03:33] Craig Frehlich: So we might deliver first a PowerPoint slide, but then what we have to practice and practice and practice. If we don't give students a varied approach. To the content and hopefully build their understanding in a variety of different ways and modalities. Then we're just teaching the surface level knowledge and kids aren't gonna be experts at it, nor will they be able to apply it to real world.
[00:04:02] Craig Frehlich: Situations to transfer. So VR can play an amazing role here as this tool, one aspect, one avenue of if we're teaching a unit on ecosystems, we're not gonna use VR for the whole unit, but we're gonna probably sprinkle it in as a tool for varied practice to get varied perspectives, to get them to get varied engagement and understanding.
[00:04:29] Shannon Putman: Well said. I love that it isn't a replacement. It is a tool, and until we can get educators to understand the tool and let them integrate it where they feel comfortable, I feel like it's always gonna stay at that surface level that you mentioned. I.
[00:04:46] Craig Frehlich: And ex experiential learning has such a major role to play in this. Like a quick story, when I was teaching mid part of my career, the school decided to actually embark on experiential learning and they bought some of these little 30 seater buses and they encouraged educators to get their class for.
[00:05:07] Craig Frehlich: Little 30 seater bus license and I was all game. 'cause then I could be like Ms. Frizzle and we could hop into the bus and we could drive to a little pond to study ecosystems full on place-based learning. So I took my class four license, I wrote the test. It was just a test and I did really well.
[00:05:27] Craig Frehlich: I didn't have to do any extra driving because I'd already had my driver's license. It was simply just a knowledge test, so I was all excited and so I. I got into the bus with the kids and all of a sudden, because I hadn't practiced any of it, I got really nervous. My confidence level went way down and I drove the bus with the kids and there was a bridge and the bridge had piping underneath it.
[00:05:56] Craig Frehlich: The bus had this bubble, like a little sort of, that allowed sunlight in, and I totally drove the bus and the bubble came off. I knocked it off 'cause the height of the bridge. Was too low for the bus. Now, thankfully, it didn't scrape the kids' heads off. It just took this bubble. But what that taught me is just like I should, like a, because I took the test, I had this undue sense of confidence, which if I would've had.
[00:06:24] Craig Frehlich: Driving practice, I bet you that confidence would've been better. We call it the Dunning Kruger effect, where you get a false sense of confidence because you do well in one situation, but you haven't been exposed to others. And so back to vr, like what if they would've let me do a driving simulator or what if they would've gave me a variety of modalities to let me practice and assess my understanding instead of just a paper and pencil test, which I did really well on.
[00:06:53] Shannon Putman: That is hilarious. And your driving skills sound very similar to mine. But that's 'cause I don't have good spatial awareness, but I would've done the exact same thing and you know, so for some people that would say, well, why don't you just get in the bus and drive around and practice, I. And for busy teachers and busy educators that don't have that time, and they're like, now you want me to learn a new technology and everything too?
[00:07:15] Shannon Putman: When am I supposed to find the time? What do you say when people come to you with that complaint?
[00:07:21] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, that, I mean, that's a hard one. And you know, it's, the answer to this isn't system wide. We need to totally flip ed the educational system on its head. That's not the answer. I think I. A, a couple little small pieces, you know, meet educators where they're at, like when you sit down with them and say, let's look at your unit, you know, maybe we can find some time within there, like, besides teachers saying they just don't have time to learn the tech.
[00:07:52] Craig Frehlich: A lot of teachers also said they just don't have time to put it into their already crowded delivery of the curriculum. So kind of, I see both those two things as sit down with them. And say like, the efficacy is this. Maybe start small. Like I know lots of schools who will have incentivized systems where it's like, here's one headset.
[00:08:15] Craig Frehlich: Go take it home. Play with it for a while. Try Beat Saber or try puzzling places, which aren't necessarily educational apps, but let them get comfortable first on their own time in a playful way. That gets them hooked. I don't know too many students or adults who haven't said to me once they've tried and put a headset on that they weren't like, wow, okay, I get this.
[00:08:42] Craig Frehlich: I'm ready to go to like phase two, which is now show me how I might use it with my students.
[00:08:49] Shannon Putman: I love that you said that about play and enjoyment and hooking 'em, because when I work with educators and students, I never even, you know. The first two, three times, I never have them do anything instructional. I just have them do fun. And there are so many skills that I think maybe the industry thinks that people have and they don't.
[00:09:12] Shannon Putman: So the whole idea of teleporting versus smooth movement, you know, versus picking up a virtual object and using a grip button. If they're not comfortable with those skills, we've already lost them.
[00:09:24] Craig Frehlich: Brilliant. And Shannon, you know what else that does is, you know, there's this other notion John Sweller, who's an Aussie, talks about cognitive load. And cognitive load means like how much is going on in your learning space such that your working memory is just so taxed that you can't learn what you need to learn.
[00:09:42] Craig Frehlich: So what you are doing there, Shannon, which is brilliant, is let's get rid of the extraneous cognitive load of how to use the controllers, how to navigate a space, let's get that over with ahead of time, get them comfortable so that when we do put them in a learning experience, they don't have to worry about all that extra stuff because they're used to it and comfortable with the space.
[00:10:05] Craig Frehlich: So I love that.
[00:10:07] Shannon Putman: Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing, you know, Chromebooks, all that kind of stuff. You know, new tech, smart boards, everything. It's the natural progression and I think the more people that we have helping to guide. Educators on this journey. That's one of the things that I've found difficult, that I felt for so long.
[00:10:24] Shannon Putman: And I think I had even mentioned it to you, that I felt alone for so long because I was doing it in the silo. Nobody believed me that VR was good and I didn't have anybody to turn to. So I found this wonderful community. And so is there anybody or any place that you go to when you're like, you know what, I just need to talk to somebody who gets it.
[00:10:42] Shannon Putman: Where do you find that support?
[00:10:44] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, LinkedIn is big for me, so, you know, not only yourself, but there's other people doing these sorts of things on LinkedIn that is our great connections. Educators in VR is another great platform. I know they have a very robust Discord channel that has lots of posts and is really active, you know, so those two mediums or those two community spaces have been invaluable for me.
[00:11:11] Craig Frehlich: And then. Just reading a lot of books on learning, you know, so how do we learn or the science of learning or you know, one book that has been particularly great for me is Learning in 3D by Carl Kapp. So these sorts of sort of, again, it goes back for me to, we already know a lot about education and learning.
[00:11:37] Craig Frehlich: Too many people say, well there isn't a lot about vr. Well, it's not vr iss just a tool. We know a lot about what's the best way to learn something. You know, it's space out learning have a variety of different learning experiences. So reading books about that have been so helpful to me.
[00:11:55] Shannon Putman: I love that I'm gonna have to read that book because I'm. Always trying to like let people know, like you said, it's just a tool. It's still just a 3D world. So it's using to learn a 3D world in a 3D format. 'cause you know we have 3D models on a computer and everything else that people have been using.
[00:12:12] Shannon Putman: I mean they even have 3, 3, 3 D models you can put into a PowerPoint, but it's still consumed in a 2D format. 'cause it's from that flat screen. So it's more of understanding all of those concepts. And I kinda think about like when we teach volume, you know, a 2D picture, and we're like, imagine the cube behind it.
[00:12:32] Shannon Putman: Well, what do we do? We give kids blocks. And so it's like doing that, but now the block isn't actually there, but you can make the block whatever you want.
[00:12:42] Craig Frehlich: Yeah. And we call that sweat equity. You know, I often akin it to, you know, putting together IKEA furniture, even though putting together IKEA fur. IKEA furniture is a bit frustrating. We put in sweat equity to the point when we've got our little chair or our dresser built, we're like, yes. 'cause we've had to work at it and 3D worlds with 3D models.
[00:13:06] Craig Frehlich: Make the learner put a little bit of sweat equity into it. A desirable difficulty is kind of what we call it. And guess what? When? When they've accomplished that, they're like, yes. And it's sticky. It's sticky learning.
[00:13:19] Shannon Putman: I love that. Sweat equity. I'm gonna steal that one too, man. I'm stealing all your secrets. You share them freely, so
[00:13:26] Craig Frehlich: I've learned a lot from you too. So it goes both ways.
[00:13:29] Shannon Putman: Well, thank you so much. So I have one other kind of question. I know you've worked with some different companies and even as a Compson fan, I hate to say this, but with the Ohio State University.
[00:13:39] Shannon Putman: So is there any certain project or just thing that you're especially proud of? And don't be bashful, this is your time to kind of just brag on yourself a little bit 'cause you deserve it.
[00:13:49] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, I mean there's lots of different organizations that I've done work with, but I think I'll talk about, a project that recently I've been working on with a company, which, you know, I won't name companies because I don't wanna make one company sort of better than the other. They're all great, but we're translating a three hour traditional rote memorization, CPR course.
[00:14:14] Craig Frehlich: Into experiential learning in engage. So again, we're not throwing out the baby with the bath water. They're still, they're getting. 2D PDF material, but we're making them again, back to sweat equity. We're making them actively experience a lot of that content in engage with learning stations to enhance.
[00:14:40] Craig Frehlich: Their understanding of the 2D material that you learn in a traditional CPR course, but now we're building on it and putting them into an engaged VR experience, which I believe, again, will not only be stickier, but also more enjoyable beyond just the sit and listen to lectures and read 2D text.
[00:15:05] Shannon Putman: That's fascinating. I absolutely cannot wait to try that, especially as somebody who's Lifeguarded since she was 15 and I went through the Red Cross VPR classes. I went through Jeff Ellis. And associates, and it's all the, you know, look for down power lines and survey the scene. And it's like, okay. You know, and I was more worried about like, when I bend over the mannequin, like, is, are my pants coming down, you know? As opposed to learning. So removing those barriers is very exciting. And I know you said you didn't wanna mention a company, but that's okay because I'm going, Chris Matson will be a guest and I love Engage and I call them the Swiss Army Knife of vr. And so it's okay to absolutely talk about them and.
[00:15:47] Shannon Putman: One of the things that they've really leaned heavy into is their school of AI and their AI creator. And I know AI tends to freak a lot of educators out. They get very nervous. They think they're getting replaced. They think everybody's just gonna be cheating. But one of the aspects that I love about it is it allows you to experience the unexpected.
[00:16:08] Shannon Putman: So in that CPR example that you gave. I can sit there in the Red Cross and go through all the things. Well, what if I'm sitting there and I'm doing it? And then all of a sudden, like in today's world, somebody comes up and starts filming you and now you're being live streamed and everything you do is gonna be judged.
[00:16:23] Shannon Putman: How do you react? So do you see any AI advantages to being able to have those kind of things? Or how else would you see AI being integrated?
[00:16:32] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, fantastic question and great example and thanks for couching it in the CPR example because we did just that. So one of the dry, boring parts at the start of the CPR course is just like duty of care and the legalities around it. So what we did was we engage has. These AI avatars that you can give them instructions or prompt them to tell them what their job is, what their persona is.
[00:17:03] Craig Frehlich: So we prompted it and gave it the legalese information so you can go in and you're inside a contextually relevant space, and you have prompting questions and you have to talk. To this AI avatar about a situation that's occurred in this hotel and the hotel workers collapsed. You know, some of the questions you have to ask it is, I don't know this part particular procedure, do I have to begin to engage in CPR?
[00:17:34] Craig Frehlich: And again, it's such a more transactional or interactive way. To take the boring legalese around the course and be able to talk through with someone like like they're proverbial experts, so it's great they can start to answer some of the questions that you have and quandaries and it's not scripted.
[00:17:54] Craig Frehlich: And so it's great because some of the questions that come out of, and answers that come out of this one, two-way experience is quite great.
[00:18:03] Shannon Putman: Yes. That's, I love that. And it, it prepares students for the real world. That's what, especially with my special ed students, you know, they would say, oh, well, they don't let loud noises so they don't go to assemblies. Or I'm like. No, like the world is a loud place that's not preparing them for the real world.
[00:18:22] Shannon Putman: And so I was very big on ensuring that my students would be prepared for success and however that looked. And so one of the last things that I'll kind of touch on with what you said is, do you have this, okay, so you have this student, they have this great experience, and they do all the CPR and everything.
[00:18:38] Shannon Putman: And then w then I have the, you know, we've got those educators that love to always. You know, find maybe a complaint and they're like, oh, well great. Now what am I even needed for? So what do you say to the teacher that thinks it's just, oh, you put 'em in this lesson, it's in isolation, and then your job is done.
[00:18:54] Shannon Putman: How does the educator then become back a part of the process? I.
[00:19:00] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, a couple things. One, these experiences, especially those that are happening inside the headset, I. Should require a pre-brief. So these are the learning outcomes that boys and girls that, you know, we're hoping that you're gonna get out of this VR experience. You know, hopefully they might even set the stage by giving like a news clip.
[00:19:25] Craig Frehlich: I'll often try and use the news to try and. Introduce and hook the learner beforehand. In the case of CPR, maybe I find a news clip where someone, you know, performed CPR and they were successful and they saved this person's life, or, you know, sadly maybe not. Someone did perform CPR and it didn't work out 'cause maybe there was no a ED around or whatever to try and give them.
[00:19:51] Craig Frehlich: A hook or an introduction. Then we put them in the experience. They know what their learning outcomes are. They're hooked because they saw this news clip, they experience it. Then they need a post brief. Where we take the headsets off, we talk about and discuss, how did that feel? You know, what were some things that you got out of this experience?
[00:20:14] Craig Frehlich: What were some things that you feel, you know, you're missing? So having a discussion afterward is key, you know? Debriefing even from a social emotional perspective, right? So again, the teacher is still the coach, they're still the driver of the bus, which is taking kids on this learning journey. And the VR is something that you place in the middle.
[00:20:37] Shannon Putman: Yeah. Perfect. I know I keep saying I love that. I love that. But I do like, I'll have to work on my synonyms, but it, you're exactly right. The teacher is still the main focus, and that's why it brings back, it brings it all back to why. The educator needs to have the skills and to understand the technology and how it's used so they can remain that driver.
[00:20:59] Shannon Putman: And I personally would use I have used this a lot actually. Especially being from Syracuse and a diehard Bills fan. Go Bills. I always use DeMar Hamlin as my example of that. And I've even talked with his foundation about. Expanding into Kentucky and what they're doing and they're doing some great work.
[00:21:16] Shannon Putman: So I don't mind doing a cheap plug for DeMar, see if we'll get 'em on the podcast. But I like that though because it makes it relevant. It makes it something that they can understand. So before I actually wrap up, I'm gonna give you kind of just a couple minutes. Is there any, anything else that you would just like to share or any, you know, parting words of wisdom that you would like to give to our audience?
[00:21:37] Craig Frehlich: Yeah, start small. Like you talked about this already and that was like how do we get reluctant or apprehensive educators a chance to. Dabble in this tool and by start small, like VR can be used for 10 minutes for simple retrieval practice. You know, I did some work for Zoe Immersive and they in Zoe immersive their platform, you can create these little text boxes.
[00:22:05] Craig Frehlich: So you could just simply create a whole bunch of text boxes that are grab-able and interactable and you could get the students to sort them, you know, which are synonyms for each other. And you can join them together, and then you get this feedback. Something tiny like that where even if you're just, every course or every subject or every topic has key vocabulary, but how do we get kids to understand that key vocabulary?
[00:22:32] Craig Frehlich: Write the definitions out great, but let's now put them in a little 10 minute VR experience where they have to grab the terms and maybe connect them together in this interactive way that helps them in a different modality than just. Sit down and write things out, which has a role to play, but I think we can enhance that.
[00:22:50] Craig Frehlich: So start small. It doesn't have to be a giant, you know, serious game. It could be just a simple little 10 minute activity.
[00:22:59] Shannon Putman: Perfect. Start small for success. Absolutely. I'm gonna have to hop in there and work on my synonyms. Thank you. So I'll just get some access to that. Well, Craig, this has been absolutely fantastic. Fabulous, wonderful.
[00:23:12] Craig Frehlich: Thanks for doing what you do, Shannon. I love your posts on Instagram and or on uh, LinkedIn, and I love the work that you're doing.
[00:23:20] Shannon Putman: Well, thank you so much.