Abstract:

The educational institutions describe a learning environment as a space in which students interact under proper physical, human, social and cultural circumstances in order to generate meaningful training experiences, guided by a teacher in physical environments such as the classroom or outdoors as nature, also with new technologies in immersive places such as virtual reality.

The learning of the student depends largely on these learning environments because they facilitate a formation of the cognitive structures that the student will replicate during the whole school time; in this aspect, the student is the protagonist of his own learning. In the traditional school the student was just a receptive agent waiting for the teacher to transmit knowledge, the teacher was the base and condition of educational success, the best resource in that model was the board, where the teacher used his skills to make a representation and explanation of the knowledge to be transmitted.

However, with the upcoming arrival of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the classroom, these have been marking a trend of change, also new learning environments have been created and adapted to the new generations of students known as "digital natives", in where it is necessary to look for other media that capture their attention, as in the case of Immersive Learning Environments. In this case, the student can interact in highly developed digital spaces through a computer and specialized hardware devices such as Head Mounted Display (HMD) in order to experience a new way of acquiring knowledge.

In the development of praxeological research, qualities and characteristics of virtual reality were analyzed in order to propose applications in higher education from an immersive, multisensory and interactive experience. In this way, students explore, interact and get involved with the knowledge in a different way. To do this, a review of commercial and academic uses of virtual reality-VR was made. Additionally, an exercise-workshop was designed with a group of students of the university to determine the feasibility of incorporating this technology into the classroom and to identify the different topics that can be developed with VR. It is expected that these be pertinent to the curriculum.

The results showed that it is designed for anatomy, practices with robotics, simulations and some for biology. Also, in the development phase, virtual laboratories are being prepared, in non-formal education it is managed by the motoring and aeronautical academies. For engineering areas, there is a lack of specialized software as well. This is why, it is necessary to create new projects focused on contents for academic spaces.

In Colombia, the virtual interaction is carried out through tutorials assisted communication and simulations. This is why, the research allowed the workshop named before. A methodology to adapt VR software to topics related to syllabus (measures and magnitudes) was proposed. An evaluation method to qualify the worked topics with this technology was also implemented. The conclusions were that the students paid more attention in the class; there was remembrance of what was studied about magnitudes, because the subject was very visual, interactive, with representations of objects and their respective dimensions, which allowed to learn and associate measurements with every day and to recognize VR as a significant resource to incorporate into the teaching practice.

Keywords:

Devices HMD, Multimedia, Virtual reality, didactic, New Technologies, Higher Education.