PBL-based VR course for preservice teachers’ designing skills in applied university under coronavirus

ABSTRACT

Smart education and ubiquitous learning have come over globally, especially under coronavirus regime. Visual media and interactive operation can draw children’s attention and interests, so the VR educational software becomes a prominent trend for training children. However, in K12 education, the VR technology is just in its initial period. In the face of global coronavirus context, and children’s visual learning characteristics, training preservice teachers with abilities to develop the VR educational software is crucial. In the project, it designs the VR course for preservice teachers in applied university that cultivates preservice teachers, trains them to develop the VR educational software, and enables them to develop it. It designs the VR course to accomplish the above two objectives in two aspects: creating PBL-based VR teaching cases to give them a sense of achievement and leading them to develop the VR educational software as the summarizing test. The results are presented in three views. Firstly, their developed VR educational software shows that the PBL cases are effective in training students’ ability of developing the VR educational software. Secondly, it investigates the effectiveness of PBL-based VR course by t-test. Finally, it surveys their satisfaction for the course, ideas about what other technologies they want to learn, what subjects they want to develop for, and what types of software they want to design to guide course research in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Influence of coronavirus to education
• virtual reality
• PBL-based course design
• applied university
• preservice teachers’ developing skills

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the teaching reform project of Beijing Union University [Project No. 12205561110], and Ministry of Education of the People Republic of China [Project No. 20YJC880088].