When Tech Platforms Donate The Resources

December 26, 2025

When Tech Platforms Donate The Resources

[EDIT: This post was originally written in January 2023 and lightly edited in 2025]

As much as I admire Jeremy Bailenson's research work (really!) his Communication 166/266 Virtual People course in June 2021 had some real problems. In its defense, it was a first-of-its-kind course, even if it wasn't the very first course in VR. Depending on how to split VR versus XR, groups of this size, 263, have met synchronously in other platforms.

Boast Much?

Bailenson defends: “To the best of my knowledge, nobody has networked hundreds of students (with) VR headsets for months at a time in the history of virtual reality, or even in the history of teaching.”

Further, he states:

The scale of this course is what sets it apart compared to other “in-VR” courses. In addition to having a relatively large number of students enrolled in the course, we also had a large number of sessions taking place in VR over time, many of which were in a networked virtual environment. To our knowledge, prior courses that have used VR in an educational setting have rarely accomplished all three of these criteria.

Here is a YouTube video, Stanford "Virtual People" class in the Metaverse posted by Bailenson.

The ENGAGE Platform

In the video clips, we see the ENGAGE platform.

Why ENGAGE? It was not deeply explained, here:

In addition to the headsets, the course also needed software to connect the students and teachers. For this, Bailenson said the university decided to use the ENGAGE virtual communication system. ENGAGE is used by major companies and educational organizations to hold virtual meetings and events.

A Big Problem

I looked at some of the film clips closely. I searched and the early clips appear to be deleted off of YouTube. I have facilitated small and large events in XR.

In the video clips of this course, I can detect that sound appeared to be a somewhat major problem in the platform; getting users to hear, signal that they could hear, or having multiple groups in one space (like a lab) and hear over top of each other.

The Headsets

Learners in the course received the Quest 2 headsets.

"Virtual Reality is becoming mainstream, with more than ten million systems being used in the United States alone. This class examines VR from the viewpoint of various disciplines, including popular culture, engineering, behavioral science, and communication. Each student will receive an Oculus Quest 2 headset, and the bulk of our learning will occur while immersed in VR."

Each student was given the headset:

Each was given an Oculus Quest 2 headset

According to another course from 2022, headsets were to be returned at the end of the semester:

Screen capture of a Stanford 2022 course with price of US$3699 saying headset would be provided but must be returned

Facebook Meta provided a "workaround" for the forced use of Facebook accounts in the headsets:

The Facebook login requirement had sparked complaints and privacy worries, leading some organizations to seek a workaround. Stanford University uses Meta's headsets in its courses on VR, said Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of the institution's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. To ensure student privacy, the lab had to seek Meta's help in creating anonymized accounts for classroom use.

This article comes right out and says this:

And money for the project—as well as donated VR headsets for students at the participating colleges—comes from Meta, the company that owns Facebook.

The connection between Facebook Meta and Stanford has been documented.

While the experience was good in that, at the beginning of trying out any new technology, there will be false starts. Said another way, it is good to learn that bringing in 30 learners to one large-ish lab space to teach separate labs of 5 people each won't work if there is flat sound. That has be learned. I think his course showed that.

But overall, conducting a course with donated technology and then turning around and saying the learning was great is a conflict of interest.

I found a written summary here, but it's light on conclusions. There a few glimmers, but otherwise, they did seem to hint that the groups versus sound problems that appeared in the video did happen.

[EDIT: I decided to publish this post on 12/26/2025. I've done quite a deeper dive on that course and the publications around it. I feel even more confident and I edited this article to come right out and say that Bailenson had a conflict of interest, rather than a "dis-authentic event in research" around the entire course and following publications.]