Abstract:

The pandemic has been challenging university education in a way like never before. At the same time, the pandemic caused disruptive changes and enabled innovations. Online learning including immersive techniques have increased (cf. Salako et al., 2017). The teaching method presented has emerged from case study-based and simulated business negotiation situations for future automotive sales managers that were already part of the curriculum in the past. Referring to Pagano (2013), we are proposing immersive learning for collaboration and decision-making situations. A briefing and diving into the situation during the pandemic was difficult, therefore a new approach using immersive teaching was chosen, developed and evaluated in a pilot. Immersive teaching has been known in language training for decades (cf. Lan & Grant, 2021) and is based on the paradigm that learning is more effective in a real-world or imagined real-world situation. Particularly for learning complex skills. Since it appeals to more different senses and not simply the mind on an abstract level, students are assumed to learn faster and memorize content more deeply. Besides factual knowledge, they become stronger in conceptual and procedural knowledge (Makransky & Peterson, 2021) There are different approaches to immersive learning. Starting from narrative and descriptive situations, today, immersive teaching can make use of a whole portfolio of technology, with the latest being virtual reality hard- and software (cf. Sherman & Craig, 2015). For our case study, we decided to use technology-based tools partially, including picture material, virtual trainings and videos with information and actual situations, however, to avoid infection risks and allow a wide platform-independent usage, we did not include virtual reality gear. Therefore, the cognitive immersion is rather emphasized than a visual immersion. The full paper and presentation will comprise a description of our teaching module for international distribution in emerging markets and experiences and evaluation results.

Keywords:

Immersive Teaching, Virtual Teaching, Teaching Innovation, Higher Education, Automotive Distribution.