Abstract:

The 21st century promotes massive change in teaching practices. The first pressure that led to faster incremental innovations occurred during pandemics. These changes help stimulate research into new practices to adapt teaching to new generations of students. In particular, in engineering and health courses, real-world interaction with a machine or human body is key to a faster learning curve.

We propose to reflect on the impact of the use of virtual and augmented reality approaches in improvised teaching methods, specifically in courses in the area of engineering and in the area of management, from different academic years of undergraduate courses in a higher education institution. A survey was conducted in order to measure students' awareness and readiness to use these solutions. Besides the social characterization variables, we included in the questionnaire indicators that refer to the applicability and usefulness of the technologies being studied, seeking to increase the involvement of students in the teaching of the particular course they are pursuing and in school, in general. The investigators assume that the outputs in terms of acquisition of knowledge and skills are increased by the use of active methodologies. Basically, we sought to explore students' perceptions regarding their knowledge of these technologies, and how they envision their applicability in different components of their technical and practical training. The results show that students are receptive to new learning methods based on new information technologies, but also that there are some limitations in their use related to the type of content to be learned, inviting a pragmatic approach in terms of its integration in active teaching and learning methodologies.

Keywords:

students, augmented reality, virtual reality, active learning