Design of an immersive online crisis preparation learning environment

This paper describes the design and development of an online immersive learning environment focused on supporting the general public in awareness of, and preparation for, crisis situations. The system developed uses the PANDORA+ training environment, and integrates prior research work carried out on eLearning and Crisis Management. Specifically, it pulls together the outputs of three European funded research projects, described in the paper, which provided the authors with a rich multimedia, immersive training environment for crisis managers, experience in the management and support of a large, distributed learning exercise through a MOOC, and extensive survey information on general population awareness of crisis responses and attitudes to crisis preparation. Based on these outputs, the authors are using the PANDORA⁺ training environment both as a field event support tool and as a MOOC platform, to support large-scale general public crisis preparation training.