Investigating the Effectiveness of Desktop Virtual Reality for Teaching and Learning of Electrical/Electronics Technology in Universities

Abstract

This study compared efficiency of desktop virtual reality with a conventional classroom learning practice for the teaching and learning of electrical/electronics technology. This was measured through academic achievement, learning interest, and engagement. A quasi-experimental design was employed for this study. Four universities were used for the study. The students were within the ages of 17 to 24?years. Students were assigned to either an experimental or comparison group based on intact classes. A total of 149 students participated in this experiment; however, only 142 samples could be analyzed. Seven samples were not analyzed due to incomplete instruments answered and absenteeism. Seventy-four students were in the virtual reality group while 68 students were in the non virtual reality group. The sample was 78.52% and 21.48% in males and females, respectively. Analysis of covariance was used to test three formulated hypotheses on effects of desktop virtual reality on the learning effectiveness of the students. There was a significant difference in academic achievement, learning interest, and learning engagement between the two groups. It was established that desktop virtual reality positively affected students’ academic achievement, learning interest, and engagement of students in electronics technology. It was suggested that virtual reality should be adopted to augment laboratory practices for the teaching and learning of electrical/electronics technology in Nigerian universities.     

Developing an interactive augmented reality system as a complement to plant education and comparing its effectiveness with video learning

The learning of plants has garnered considerable attention in recent years, but students often lack the motivation to learn about the process of plant growth. Also, students are not able to apply what they have learned in class in the form of observation, since plant growth takes a long time. In this study, we use augmented reality (AR) technology to develop the ARFlora system, which can assist students in observing the changes in plant growth while in the classroom. More specifically, students are able to use AR markers to manipulate various virtual objects (e.g. sunlight) and observe the changes they have on plant growth. Meanwhile, a quasi-experimental evaluation is in place to substantiate the effectiveness of ARFlora in the learning of plants and to compare it with digital video learning. In the quasi-experimental design, 55 elementary-school students participated in the study. The participants are divided into two groups, an “experimental group” and a “control group.” The experimental group was taught using the ARFlora system, while the control group was taught by employing the digital video. Results show that (1) ARFlora and digital video have the same effectiveness on student's learning outcomes; (2) ARFlora is more effective in helping students retain learned knowledge; and (3) ARFlora is comparatively more useful in motivating students to learn about plants.     

基于网络虚拟环境的大学英语体验式教学研究

体验式学习是以学习者为中心,通过真实或虚拟地经历某一事件或过程,并经过反思来获得知识、发展能力、生成情感的学习方式,它注重学习的情境性、交互性、亲历性,符合英语学习的特点和要求。本研究借助"第二人生"为代表的网络虚拟环境进行体验式英语学习的探索,并通过访谈了解"第二人生"对学生学习英语的影响以及学生对此种学习方式的态度。研究发现,"第二人生"下的英语学习可以增强学生的英语学习动机,为学生听说能力的培养提供丰富的活动和生动的学习环境,是对英语课堂教学的有益补充,基于网络虚拟环境的英语教学具有很大的研究和开拓空间。     

Teachers’ and students’ perspectives on teaching and learning through virtual learning environments

The aim of this investigation was to get an insight into how teachers and students responded to the use of virtual learning environments (VLE) in engineering education and what their expectations were from online courses. Teachers designed their online courses with the assistance of a support e-learning team and questionnaires were used for teachers and students to express their views on the online courses. Teachers pointed out that the online courses by themselves would be able to tackle limited lecture time and strengthen the students’ background knowledge. Students, on the other hand, stated that their difficulties regarding the courses could be facilitated by using a more interactive teaching approach with the use of collaboration tools and receiving individual feedback. Thus, students suggested that teachers adopt a more student-centred approach by using VLE. Teachers’ and students’ perspectives were related to their personal characteristics, as students were more familiar with everyday e-communication tools.     

基于SecondLife的体验式学习活动设计

文章借助当前流行的SecondLife三维虚拟平台,在分析其特点和体验式学习相结合的优势的基础上,探索在该平台上构建学习环境,开展体验式学习活动。认为借助SecondLife所构建的虚拟学习环境,具有高度的仿真性,学习者通过化身可视化、"面对面"地以文本、语音、表情等方式互动,借助相关工具进行学习评价和自我反思,从而获得良好的体验学习效果。     

A phenomenology of learning large: the tutorial sphere of xMOOC video lectures

The current discourse surrounding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is powerful. Despite their rapid and widespread deployment, research has yet to confirm or refute some of the bold claims rationalizing the popularity and efficacy of these large-scale virtual learning environments. Also, MOOCs’ reputed disruptive, game-changing potential for education remains unsubstantiated. A sober counterbalance is needed, in particular, via attending to students’ everyday accounts of the complex realities of learning in these massive online courses. This article reports on an exploratory, phenomenological study of the xMOOC learning experience. Our interest was not the xMOOC experience of students in general, but in its singular, lived particularities. What we discovered was a unique and intimate tutorial sphere that seemed to develop for some xMOOC students in the context of the video lectures, an experience sometimes marked by a sense of fandom surround.     

分布式多用户三维虚拟校园系统

本文提出并设计了分布式多用户三维虚拟校园远程教育系统。在三维空间中,利用虚拟现实技术构建虚拟的校园生活。将校园生活的各种场景、细节和体验完全复制到互联网上。不受空间位置和相互距离的限制,可让远距离的师生或位置分散的学生“共处于”一个虚拟的校园空间中,使得能够沉浸在友好的环境中,多用户交互,协同学习,激发学生的学习兴趣,提高远程教育质量,为远程教育增强学习的氛围、构建虚拟校园文化。该系统有效解决了当前远程教育所遇到的困难,具有很高的实用价值,将是远程教学系统的新发展方向。     

Using learning environments to create meaningful work for co-op students

For students in cooperative education (co-op) programs, meaningful work is a critical aspect of participation and a key component of program success. However, studies have not explored how meaningful work can be created for co-op students. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between co-op students’ perceptions of a learning environment, perceived relatedness of the work experience (to their potential careers and to their academic studies), and self-reported meaningfulness of work. Data were collected from undergraduate co-op students in a Canadian university immediately following a co-op work term. Results from testing a parallel mediation model showed that both forms of relatedness partially mediated the influence of learning environments on self-reported meaningfulness. These findings offer insight into the ways in which work terms can be designed to enhance co-op students’ work experiences.     

Experiential learning in doctoral training programmes: fostering personal epistemology through collaboration

There has been increasing recognition for the need to reform doctoral training practices to foster students’ personal epistemology. This study describes the design and evaluation of a learning experience designed to help students understand the scholarly publication process. Firstly, this study discusses the design of the learning experience, describing the collaborative process of writing an interdisciplinary publication using both online and face-to-face learning. Secondly, this study evaluates the effectiveness of the learning experience by examining students’ reflections. We show that participation in the learning experience helped students to develop their academic writing proficiency, collaboration and teamwork, intercultural competence, and ability to engage in reflective practice. Importantly, we show that each student also created more individualised knowledge, gaining insight into how they and others think. This study, therefore, demonstrates that personal epistemology can be fostered through collaboration in a doctoral writing group context.     

Blended Learning for Learner Empowerment: Voices from the Middle East

Blended learning (BL) is still in its infancy in the United Arab Emirates, but is gaining growing attention and acceptance. The particular university under investigation offers its nationally accredited graduate programs with a BL format that makes use of synchronous virtual classrooms, asynchronous self-study, and face-to-face sessions. The current qualitative research study investigates students' perceptions about their experience with the BL model within their relatively conservative cultural context. In addition, the project aimed at gauging their suggestions for course design considerations that would meet their needs as adult learners and enhance their learning experience. Twenty-one graduate students participated in the study, with findings indicating an overall positive perception about the BL experience with a strong positive impact on female empowerment. The most salient themes for successful instructional strategies indicated the importance of student-centered practices, particularly collaborative projects and student-led activities.     

Research results of two personal learning environments experiments in a higher education institution

This paper focuses on institutionally powered personal learning environments (iPLEs). The concept of the iPLE can be seen as a way universities can incorporate learner-centred approach into the architecture of their technology-enhanced learning environments. The aim of this paper is to pose that there are other ways to learn complementary to virtual learning environments, such as using distributed Web 2.0 tools from personal learning environments (PLEs). With that aim in mind, this paper presents an exploratory study with two different iPLE configurations, analyses how they modify the learning–teaching process, and reports their perceived usefulness from the students' point of view. These two case studies were carried out by a research group of educational technology from a Spanish university in graduate and postgraduate courses. As reported by other case studies, the results revealed that students use the environment basically in the academic context and this usage is conceived as another time and effort requiring task. This fact can be observed in the low level iPLEs customization. The overall conclusions we can extract are, on the one hand, that the new environment to integrate informal and formal learning should be flexible and adaptable to the student's needs and preferences and, on the other hand, that academic tools might someday become personal tools.     

基于农村幼儿教师的学习特点开展教师培训

农村幼儿教师具有不同于在校学生的学习特点,他们是成人学习者和全职工作者,其学习方式以日常经验学习为主,他们对培训效果的评价更倾向于可操作性和应用价值;与城市幼儿教师的培训需求相比,他们更重视直观经验的获取。基于这些特点,我们需要对当前教师培训的目标、课程设置、培训方式、培训评价等方面进行反思。     

Fostering integration of informational texts and virtual labs during inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based learning allows students to learn about scientific phenomena in an exploratory way. Inquiry-based learning can take place in online environments in which students read informational texts and experiment in virtual labs. We conducted two studies using eye-tracking to examine the integration of these two sources of information for students from vocational education (78 and 71 participants, respectively, mean age of 13 years and 7 months). In Study 1, we examined whether the amount of time spent on reading text and on integrating the text content with information from a virtual lab (as measured via gaze switches between the text and the lab) affected the quality of the inquiry-based learning process in the lab (i.e., correctly designed experiments and testable hypotheses created) and the learning gain (increase in domain knowledge from pretest to posttest). Results showed, on average, a gain in domain knowledge. Pretest scores were related to posttest scores, and this relation was mediated by the score for correctly designed experiments in the lab. There was no relation between informational text reading time and inquiry process quality or learning gain, but more frequent integration was associated with a higher score for experimentation in the virtual lab, and more frequent integration attenuated the relation between pretest score and designing correct experiments. Integration could thus compensate for the negative effects of lower prior knowledge. In Study 2, we examined whether integration was stimulated by highlighting correspondences between the informational text and the virtual lab (i.e., signaling). Integration was higher than in Study 1, but this did not further improve the quality of the inquiry process or the learning gain. A general conclusion is that integration fosters inquiry-based learning, but that stimulating additional integration may not result in further improvement.     

Under the Umbrella: Pedagogy,knowledge production,and video from the margins of the movement

Abstract

In September 2014, students and Hong Kong citizens took to the streets demanding universal suffrage. Cell phones and video cameras in hand, amateur student filmmakers were some of the first to capture the police tear-gassing young people that brought the city to its feet. Young people were positioning themselves as storytellers and knowledge producers on the streets. How has this restructured hierarchy of knowledge production often found in university education in Hong Kong? How too has being active participants and/or passive observers of the events of the Umbrella Movement translated into a pedagogy of experience in student’s daily lives, and how has this knowledge returned to the classroom? Specifically, I am interested in ways that young women who are not Cantonese first-language speakers understand their role in the movement and the kinds of knowledge they produced. Through interviews with these diverse students, and visual data from the footage they shot during the protests, we gain a rare glimpse into the multicultural world gathered beneath the umbrella of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and how a new generation of young female filmmakers are using video to share their changing perspectives on democratic reform, education, and everyday life.     

基于虚拟全景的学习方式促进学习动机与写作成绩的实证研究

虚拟现实(Virtual Reality)技术在学习领域的融合将成为未来教育发展的新趋势。以写作学习为研究主题,在分析小学阶段写作学习存在的诸多现实问题基础上,认为利用虚拟现实技术构筑全景式学习场景并应用到写作学习过程中,能够促进学生学习动机与写作成绩的提升。由此,进一步开展了实证性分析,通过创设以《长城》为写作主题的虚拟全景式学习方式,研究某小学三年级学生的学习动机与写作成绩是否会因学习方式改变而得到一定提升。研究利用独立样本t检验法与单因素方差分析法对实验组与对照组开展写作学习活动的实验数据进行了处理与分析。结果表明:基于虚拟全景的学习方式能够促进写作整体成绩的提高,但是学习动机并不因虚拟环境的介入有所提升;写作成绩在四个维度(主题契合度、结构完整性、语言表达力、思维创新性)的表现上,思维创新性维度上的成绩提升力度相对较低,这需要在分析其原因的基础上,进一步采取措施提升学生创意性写作能力。     

Learning by teaching in immersive virtual reality – Absorption tendency increases learning outcomes

We investigated the learning outcome of teaching an agent via immersive virtual reality (IVR) in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared IVR to a less immersive desktop setting and a control condition (writing a summary). Learning outcomes of participants who had explained the topic to an agent via IVR were better. However, this was only the case for participants who scored high on absorption tendency. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether including social cues in the task instructions enhances learning in participants explaining a topic to an agent. Instruction manipulation affected learning as a function of absorption tendency: Low-absorption participants benefitted most from being instructed to imagine they were helping a student peer pass an upcoming test, while high-absorption participants benefitted more when they were to explain the text to a virtual agent. The findings highlight the crucial role of personality traits in learning by teaching in IVR.     

"第二人生"与数字化游戏式学习环境

“第二人生”（Second Life）是一部模拟真实的大型多人在线角色扮演游戏，它巧妙融合了联网游戏和在线虚拟社区的诸多概念，创造了一种新型的网络空间。SL为信息时代的学习、教育提供了积极的、浸润式的数字化游戏式学习环境，一些大学和教育机构已经开始使用SL，鼓励师生探索、学习和合作。基于人与人、人与对象、对象与对象三种活动方式，SL中的教育潜力可以被不断发掘出来。     

Game-based learning in an OpenSim-supported virtual environment on perceived motivational quality of learning

This experimental study was intended to examine whether game-based learning (GBL) that encompasses four particular game characteristics (challenges, a storyline, immediate rewards and the integration of game-play with learning content) in an OpenSimulator-supported virtual reality learning environment can improve perceived motivational quality of the learning activity (P-MQLA) for elementary school students. In this pre- and post-test experimental comparison study, data were collected from 132 fourth-graders through a Short Instructional Materials Motivation Survey. The same tasks were provided for the experimental and control groups, except that the control group’s tasks did not include the four aforementioned gaming characteristics. The non-GBL for the control group involved mainly web-based word problems such as selecting the correct answer by clicking on the potential responses. P-MQLA was improved after the intervention in both groups. There is a trend that the experimental group improved the P-MQLA more than the control group, at borderline statistical significance. The analysis of covariance also indicated a significant interaction between the group variable and the pre-intervention P-MQLA, indicating that the effect of the virtual reality-supported GBL is moderated by learners’ pre-intervention report of P-MQLA.     

Impact of learning styles on the community of inquiry presences in multi-disciplinary blended learning environments

In this research, a survey method utilising questionnaires and focus group interviews was employed to determine correlations between students’ learning styles and each of the presences in the CoI Framework across disciplines as well as students’ blended learning experience. To this end, the linear regression model was the statistical approach used to explore the correlation between each of the presences and the learning styles after controlling for the disciplines. Consequently, a three–way cross-tab using Chi-square statistics was the statistical method used to discover the variations of the students’ experience of blended learning under different disciplines and learning styles. A total of 12 lecturers and 377 students from three private institutions were involved in this study. The results show that among the four discipline categories, only the soft-applied has a significant effect on the linear regression model. In this particular discipline, the Kinesthetic variable alone has a significant effect on all the three presences in the CoI Framework. The R-squared values are rather small. Further investigation should be directed towards an inclusion of a larger number of postgraduate participants, more courses in the soft-pure and hard-pure categories, and the learning styles of lecturers.     

Mandatory Virtual Design Studio for All: Exploring the Transformations of Architectural Education amidst the Global Pandemic

Virtual design studio (VDS) has been a part of the discourse of architectural pedagogy for the past two decades. VDS has been showcased as a potential educational tool in schools of architecture often in controlled, pre‐designed experiments. However, the global COVID‐19 pandemic has forced most schools to move their design studios into virtual space. This article aims to explore the potential advantages and shortcomings of VDS during the COVID‐19 quarantine from the perspective of students in a department of architecture. The study investigates three aspects of VDS namely, participating students’ evaluation of the virtual studio experience, the effectiveness of VDS in achieving the studio’s expected learning outcomes and the evaluation process for final design projects. Some 360 students from eight consecutive design studios participated in the study. The results indicate improvement in students’ ability to conduct independent research and in learning new computer‐aided design (CAD) software. Furthermore, the study finds VDS to be much more applicable for third‐ and fourth‐year students. The results also show a significant decline in background informal peer learning among students. Further studies are needed to address the implementation of a more immersive social experience in VDS.