Abstract:

Online delivery of teaching materials has increased tremendously in recent years and boosted the growth of online education platforms. Additionally, online teaching mode breaks traditional in-person classroom learning to allow students to study according to their own time. However, studies indicated that the pure transfer of in-person education to an online learning environment significantly reduced the engagement of students in learning processes due to insufficient levels of concentration in the course materials.

Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether students' engagement improves with a supplementary custom-developed virtual reality (VR) application. Twenty-four freshmen to senior-level engineering students experienced both conventional online learning and interaction-enhanced VR environment in Material Handling and Plant Layout course. A single problem-solving engineering economy topic was chosen to compare a recorded video lecture version of the topic with an interactive VR-google-compatible mobile application.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Student Engagement, Online Education.