VIRTUAL REALITY LEARNING SYSTEM INCREASES MOTIVATION AND IMPROVES PERFORMANCE OF TOXICOLOGY STUDENTS

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is trying to change the modalities of learning from lecture to teaching methods based on new Learning and Knowledge Technologies (LKT). The use of LKT in education can easily develop key aspects of the EHEA, such as transparency and quality in learning, global assessment of student work and finally and perhaps most important, student autonomy. Thus, the Professor becomes a guide for students to facilitate their use of resources and tools they need in order to explore and develop new knowledge and skills among which are the new information technologies. Therefore, the Professor of today must be involved in the design and development of new content and distribution process, including virtual teaching platforms.

Studies by Felder and Silverman (1988) have shown that students retain 10% of what they read, 30% of what they see, 50% of what they see and hear, 70% of what they said or write and 90% of what they do. Therefore, it is very important to implement new systems that increase the participation of students to fix long-term knowledge.

We introduce gamification in our project in order to increase the interest of students in the subject of toxicology. The use of gamification allows us to integrate different educational methodologies. In addition, we decided to implement methodologies of simulated environments that allow students a more practical training, in order to help them adapt to the real practice of their profession.

The use of simulated virtual environments with avatars produced a significant increase in the motivation and interactivity of students both outside and inside the class. This methodology also facilitated access to early learning of the procedures of the practice of the profession, thus students were able to apply in a practical way the theoretical knowledge acquired. We created games in the simulated virtual environments in which the groups of students created had to face several problems, where the theoretical knowledge acquired in class had to be applied in a practical way, in order to solve them.

We found that the use of the simulated virtual environments together with the methodology produced an increase in motivation of students, alongside with an increase of their participation in class and of their academic performance.

We believe this methodology may be of use so students will better acquire the competences they need to integrate in the working market.