**1. Introduction**

In the past two decades, more particularly since the spread of Covid19 pandemic that has forced worldwide shutdown of business schools, online education has increased remarkably and has involved increasing numbers of teachers lecturing at a distance for the first time. This resulted in tremendous compulsory use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in online courses serving as the learning platform. VR is a computer-based technology that offers students with a highly collaborative and multi-sensory learning experience [1, 2]. It delivers real-time commitment and instantaneous feedback regarding student performance and challenge [3]. However, even though there has been increasing attention devoted to ethical issues related to the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) across sectors from construction, architecture, retail, engineering, and healthcare, there has been less attention dedicated to ethical issues with the widespread use of VR in online learning. It is argued that during the Covid19 pandemic, the number of online courses in business schools is growing significantly which have several ethical issues [2, 4]. This chapter addresses ethical

issues faced by teachers and students in the business schools when using VR technology on online courses.

Using an inductive qualitative content analysis as one of the several qualitative methods currently available for analyzing data and interpreting its meaning [5], this chapter tries to answer the following ethical questions: Does the use VR technology in online courses guarantee privacy, security and confidentiality of the participants? Does a dependence on virtual reality technology in online teaching promote equity and diversity among students? What are ethical issues faced by students and teachers in their interaction using virtual reality technology in online courses? The structure of the chapter is as follows. The next section conceptualizes and defines virtual reality technology and briefly reviews various ethical issues related to the use of virtual reality technology. Section 3 discusses VR regarding online courses and the benefits of VR to online education are reviewed. Section 4 contains an ethical issues analysis faced by teachers and students and the last session discusses policy recommendations. The conclusion summarizes key ethical implications of use of VR in online courses, particularly those facing teachers and students.

### **2. Virtual reality technology**

Virtual Reality (VR) has become a most important resource and facet of our present and future learning. The term VR was first used in 1974 Myron Krueger describing specific environment, an artificial reality display as video place [6]. Today, we are experiencing the most dauting and exhausting learning perspective settings with virtual reality. One of the most commonly uses of the term defines the virtual reality systems as systems that use head-mounted exhibitions, data gloves and data suits to replicate an immersive, highly interactive computer-generated, multi-sensory information environment, in which user becomes participant in real time. Generally, many scholars use virtual reality interchangeably with cyberspace and artificial reality. For example, Brey defines virtual reality as "a three-dimensional interactive computer-generated environment that incorporates a first-person perspective" [7, p 5]. Sandra Helsel defines virtual reality as a process that enables users to become participants in abstract spaces where the physical machine and physical viewer do not exist [8].

In this chapter, VR is considered a technology that persuades students and teachers that they are in real time that replace face-to-face through the use data established shaped by a computer. It covers the entire field, comprising artificial reality, internet, and a third person and telepresence, which according to Hilary McLellan, is the sensation of being present at a distant place from where one is truly located, with the capacity to control objects at that remote location. However, the key characteristics that emerge from the virtual reality definitions include the use of three-dimensional graphics, the interactivity and a first-person perspective [9]. While interactivity requires that the represented environment must enable for manipulation, which implies the modification of aspects of the environment in a fairly direct way, such interactivity entails three-dimensional graphics. For instance, a first-person perspective, involves that the environment is recognized and interacted with from a specific point, that indicates a degree of immersion in a world, rather than the experience of the world as an entity that can be monitored from the outside [7, 10, 11].

Even though, the immersion in imaginary space as a key element of VR is important and allows one to forget about the physical distance among participants, it however cannot exactly replace the warmest face-to-face education. Such *The Rise of Virtual Reality in Online Courses: Ethical Issues and Policy Recommendations DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97516*

immersion is only limited by our imagination and how we choose to build the virtual world [12]. It is worth noting that VR technology offers several benefits, particularly in education by providing a safe, helpful and conducive environment for students to improve their learning process [12, 13]; but it poses serious issues ranging from potential mental issues, personal neglect of users' own actual bodies and its technology may be used to record personal data which may threaten personal privacy and risks the manipulation of users' beliefs, emotions, and behaviors [14, 15]. As moral obligation represents a constraint which not only mitigates a virtual world's experience, but which may prove antithetical to the medium's longrange social influence [14], therefore the focus of this chapter is on the ethical issues faced by multi-users of VR systems in online courses.

#### **3. Virtual reality and online courses**

The literature in VR is used by several different scholars with many meanings. Even though, VR was mainly used to play the most recent computer games, it is today a constantly advancing new computer technology, which offers great opportunities for the education sector. In education, it is used as a path for students and teachers to envision, control and interact with computers and tremendously complicated data [2]. By simulating learners and teachers in a face-to-face physical presence in the real environment, VR is an entirely immersive, engaging and interactive experience of another reality in which the participants feel completely absorbed in the environment by means of special human-computer interface equipment [11]. VR has the possibility to be a formidable new instrument in the teaching space. It provides the best instrument for learning by submerging learners and teachers in an environment as close to face-to-face. VR creates environments in which participants generate various social and disciplinary cultures, with unique communication patterns, norms, values, and interaction systems [16, 17], as variations in communication forms change classroom-based conceptions of teaching and online learning.

The online course systems are web-based packages for supplying, stalking, and managing courses over the cyberspace. Anderson and Simpson pointed out that online course entails the application of innovations in technology to direct, model and provide the learning substance, and to facilitate two-way communication between students and teacher [2]. It is increasingly agreed that online courses are a more useful and flexible method to taking courses that will lead to a degree. Virtual learning contains elements such as chat rooms, whiteboards, discussion forums and quizzes that enable students and teachers to communicate online and share the whole course content likely to achieve the learning goals. For instance, John C. Thomas and Rory Stuart list seven roles for online education using virtual reality including, investigating existing places and things that students would not otherwise have access to, explore real things that, without changes of scale in size and time, could not otherwise be well explored, create places and things with altered qualities, interact with people who are in distant locations through global clubs with a shared interest, or collaborations on projects between students from different parts of the world, interact with real people in non-realistic ways, create and manipulate abstract conceptual representatives, like data structures and mathematical functions and interact with virtual beings, such as representations of historical figures and agents who are representatives of different philosophies and viewpoints participating in simulated negotiations [18, p. 209].

For many of benefits, business schools are resorting to VR to deliver education online. The use of VR in education offers several benefits ranging from students

learning experience through computer-based interaction to the development of student's information and communication technology skills [7, 19]. It has been argued that the use of VR increases students' engagement in online learning by interacting them in multiple ways [20]. The use of VR in education will continue to increase student's level technological expertise in a world [21], in a world where all activities tend to be digitalized. However, despite several benefits provided by the use of VR in online learning, teaching and learning at a distance raises several ethical issues, which are even complex than those encountered by face-to-face teachers and students [2]. Zembylas & Vrasidas pointed out that online settings create sites that are 'supportive of hybrid identities, complex discourses, and multiple relations among learners.' [22, p.61]. The use VR systems in online education may raise several ethical issues that go beyond the nature and applications applied to technology to the burden of some social groups and unethical behaviors faced by learners and teachers.
