Evaluating the Effectiveness of Head-Mounted Display Virtual Reality (HMD VR) Environment on Students' Learning for a Virtual Collaborative Engineering Assembly Task

Abstract

The emerging VR social networks (e.g., Facebook Spaces, Rec Room) provide opportunities for engineering faculties to design collaborative virtual engineering tasks in their classroom instruction with HMD VR system. However, we do not how this capacity will affect students' learning and their professional skills (e.g., communication and collaboration). The proposed study is expected to fill this research gap and will use a mixed-methods design to explore students' performance and learning outcomes in a virtual collaborative automotive assembly task. The quantitative data will be collected from the pre-and-post task survey and the task itself. This data will be used to analyze the differences among experiment and control groups. Students' responses to the open questions in the post-task survey will serve as triangulation and provide deep insight for the quantitative results. The study is expected to not only contribute to the research field but also benefit different stakeholders in the engineering education systems.