Ch 4 (Zimotti & Miller De Rutté) Developing and Implementing VR Sim Med Spanish Response to ET

The COVID-19 pandemic caused instructors around the world to shift their courses online as a temporary solution to teaching. This shift in teaching modality is known as Emergency Response Teaching and Learning (ERTL), which is defined as a temporary shift in the mode of instruction due to an emergency and as a shift that requires problem-solving and thinking outside the box (Hodges et al., 2020). ERTL solutions are typically meant to be short-term in nature, but many innovations created during the pandemic have shown potential to become permanent teaching strategies (González-Lloret et al., 2021). This chapter discusses an emergency teaching innovation, developed during campuswide lockdown, which was adopted after the return to traditional teaching modalities and has become a regular component of the courses involved. The specific innovation was the development of virtual reality (VR) simulations for courses relating to medical Spanish.