The use of virtual reality in education

Abstract

Recent research in the area of multimedia conducted by the author in Australia, the United States and Latin America has re-confirmed the importance and effectiveness of visual features in teaching and learning materials. It has been demonstrated that multimedia can provide a very effective teaching and learning environment in such a way that the learning style preferences (visual, aural, text and kinaesthetic) of the learners are taken into consideration. According to the findings, the visual aspects and interaction with the multimedia system are the most preferred features amongst the surveyed students. In all of these studies, the surveyed students have also indicated that the visual features play a very important role in understanding the concepts. Based on these findings, further research was carried out to investigate the possibilities of creating even richer visual learning environments. The objective was to explore the learning effectiveness of virtual reality educational multimedia systems. Using the virtual reality multimedia, students from two different backgrounds (Nursing and Business) were given a tutorial on topics related to basic human anatomy. After the completion of this tutorial, each student was interviewed and invited to provide comments and feedback. It was concluded that virtual reality multimedia could enhance learning by providing much more realistic images and visual features. Both groups of students found the virtual reality multimedia teaching to be very effective in terms of ease of learning and its very close relationship with the real world. This paper reports the research findings of using virtual reality in teaching and learning. It also investigates the possibilities of incorporating virtual reality technology into the tertiary education courses.