The Virtual Learning Experience: Learning Styles, Task Complexity and Presence in the Context of Emerging VR Technologies

Abstract

This study investigates how emerging virtual reality technologies impact the way architecture and construction students engage in the higher education learning context. The work takes a broad perspective, bridging experiential learning theory, task complexity in educational objectives, a range of emerging virtual reality technologies and related issues such as presence and immersion and how all of these factors act in concert to influence learning styles. The principal aim of the research is to determine whether and under what conditions emerging virtual reality technologies prescribe how architecture and building students choose to learn.

The study has two elements. The first element is a longitudinal and the second element is a between-group study. Learning is measured in terms of Kolb’s learning styles grid using standard and modified versions of the learning style inventory (LSI). A series of controlled experiments are undertaken to test for the impact that specific factors identified from the literature have on the preferred learning style of the user. Data is analysed using a variety of standard statistical tests and visualisation techniques developed specifically for this research.

The results have significant implications for both theoretical and practical perspectives. From a theoretical perspective, the results reveal fundamental flaws in current learning style theory and how learning styles have been previously assigned to different learning cohorts. The results also strongly demonstrate that learning, considered in the current terms of learning styles, is not constrained or inhibited in any way by the increasing use of virtual reality technologies in the context of architecture and construction learning. The proposition that computers limit the architecture learning experience is not valid in the context of this study.

From a practical standpoint, this thesis suggests that the educational challenge is not to design a learning environment that reflects the specificity of a particular cohort, but rather how best to accommodate the variability that occurs across and within individual preferences in architecture and construction higher education.