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Abstract
There has been an increasing interest in the educational applications of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in the last decade. This growing interest is fueled by the fact that VR technologies are becoming increasingly better at rendering real-world experiences and environments in virtual space to support learning. In engineering education, VR can be utilized to support classroom and laboratory learning experiences. For example, students can experience and interact with abstract engineering concepts in three-dimensional virtual worlds in ways that they could not in the traditional engineering classroom or with engineering textbooks. Although VRs are growing in popularity, and some early adopters of educational technologies are already using them in various ways for classroom instruction, very little is known about how best to design and use them to facilitate learning in the most effective ways. Most notably, there is a dearth of VR studies that are grounded in empirically tested theoretical frameworks of learning in multimedia environments within the engineering education research literature. As such, there is a need for research studies that examine VR learning experiences. Studies that investigate the cognitive and affective factors that influence VR learning are also highly needed.
This dissertation seeks to address these existing gaps in the engineering education research literature by exploring the research literature to highlight the current state of theory-driven VR research generally, and in engineering education in particular. The dissertation comprises a systematic literature review (Study I), a scoping review of VR research in engineering education (Study II), and an empirical VR study (Study III). The systematic literature review analyzes 63 studies to identify design and pedagogy principles for enhancing multi-media learning, and their effects on learning in VR media. Study II explores the landscape of engineering VR research and identifies several gaps in current VR research studies in engineering education. The study advocates for theory-driven VR research within engineering education and makes recommendations for the future direction of VR learning research in engineering education. Study III investigates the effect of integrating generative learning principles into implementing VR learning in an engineering static course. The dissertation highlights the empirical, theoretical, and practical implications of its findings for the instructional design of effective VR content and for future VR research.