## 2 Methodology
### Education Using VRE
* _A virtual laboratory_--Science labs allow students to investigate scientific phenomenon and see inside how the world around them works, based on practical know-how. However, such environments are high-priced and almost impossible to scale. Instead of visiting a physical one, a virtual laboratory can be simulated. Students obtain proactive experience and engage in exciting exercises relevant to real-world practices. Virtual reality provides good learning opportunities and the ability to scale. * _Learning by doing_--Learning outside the classroom helps students to acquire practical skills rather than simply reading instructions. Students are stimulated in the virtual reality environment to find out things for themselves and have a chance to learn by doing things. * _Emotional reaction_--Students can recollect various details through the emotional reactions and increase their interest in the virtual reality environment. The variety of potential approaches is very wide, in particular in STEAM courses [23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28]. Often, they require specific devices (glasses, gloves, tools...) to make the virtual reality ever more truthful [29]. A tested VRE environment is accessible via web browsers. It does not require more than traditional equipment--a computer connected to the Internet, keyboard and mouse. Thus, one of goals of our research was to learn to what degree such \"VRE without VRE-equipment\" can evoke similar immersion of agents as the ones with VRE-equipment do. The university-wide strategy [18] recommends building a platform which could be used in a variety of courses, possibly in all. Our VRE campus is built as a structure with a number of mazes-microworlds. As every maze is an isolated omnipotent microworld, it can be extended to a course. In the future, all courses could be located on this platform. The students would visit them via their avatars and communicate with each other. They can share the materials which they consider to be of mutual interest. The movement between maze rooms is unrestrained but can be blocked by conditions (for example by access privileges or fulfilling a task). The entire VRE space is accessible 24/7 in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. It means that the students can work there at any time, not only individually, but also in teams, upon their mutual agreement. Every room in the learning space contains a piece of information related to the course content. Basically, the VRE allows for the traditional content to be directly transformed to a series of activities. Such a transformation should bring significant added value and not become a transcript of a plain textbook onto the web resource. Authors are emphatically discouraged from such practice. The revolutionary significance of VRE consists in its capability to move around course material much more freely, to exploit 3D content, to communicate among learners, to interact with the objects, etc.--see Figure 1. The experts from our business partner assisted in course design and development in order to maximize the power of VRE tools for knowledge delivery. Another aim of this pilot project was to test the appropriateness of the platform. Courses at the Faculty of Economics are a mixture of STEM and humanities. To learn the platform sustainability, a typical STEM course (finance) and a typical humanities one (marketing) were selected as appropriate candidates. Figure 1: Avatar giving a suggestion to the learner. To become a foundation for a mass exploitation by our university, VRE only requires commonly accessed technology: a computer with a keyboard, mouse, speakers, microphone and browser. No special devices (e.g., VR headsets or gloves) are presumed as parts of the solution because they would limit our presumed anywhere-anytime VRE usage and/or discriminate against some students. From the software point of view, VRE is a standard client-server solution processed over the web using the Software as a Service (SaaS) format. In this sense, the university is one of the clients.