Abstract:

This study investigated the effectiveness of a real-time communication tool for online engineering experiments. Based on fully online/on-demand engineering experiments of experimental items that have been conducted on campus in previous years, the introduction effectiveness of the prepared online/on-demand educational contents such for prior learning of the purpose of experiments, related principles, use of equipment, analysis of measured data, and writing-up of experiment reports was confirmed from both assessment results and the answers from students to the ex-post questionnaire. By comparing assessment results by the same faculty member to the same contents with on campus conducting with real operation of equipment in the past, both mean values of assessment scores of experimental reports and overall scores have better results with online/on-demand approach. Furthermore, standard deviations of assessment scores have markedly lower scores compared with the conventional offline approach. From the results described above, the educational effectiveness of online/on-demand contents has been confirmed. On the other hand, the necessity of real-time communication among group members for the online approach was extracted as an issue from the ex-post questionnaire. Some students reported that they felt anxiety about the accuracy of measurement data without information exchange among group members during online experiment. And other students reported that it was hard to get suggestions from group members when they lost the experimental procedure. To address the above issue, a real-time communication tool was introduced by using Google Meet, firstly. And its effectiveness was confirmed from both the assessment results and answers to the ex-post questionnaire. Considering the improvement of the sense of immersion into virtual space and the recent progress in realistic virtual space construction technology, we verified the effectiveness and possibility of improving the quality of real-time online communication among students in a metaverse environment using avatars. Based on VRChat platform with avatar whose three dimensional model was created by each student using Unity and VRCSDK, the introduction effectiveness of a metaverse approach was confirmed by the answers from students to the ex-post questionnaire. Such kind of approach for the real-time communication based on metaverse seems to be effective to improve the quality of online communication among students.

Keywords:

Engineering experiments, online education, real-time communication, metaverse, avatar.