The Effectiveness of Immersive Learning in Maritime Education and Training

Abstract

The lack of human resources in the maritime labour market provokes a rapid promotion of maritime professionals, which in turn reduces the time to acquire the required skills. Many cases of human errors on vessels were caused by an insufficient level of training, practical skills, and education of human resources. This paper represents an overview of pedagogical experiment evaluating a virtual reality (VR) practical training course. The main aim of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of immersive learning implementation into maritime education and training, and establish VR metrics. This research on VR training represents a metric-based view of VR experiments and research. A VR training case, called ‘Wall wash test procedure on chemical tanker’ was developed, as an enhanced synthetic VR environment for performing tasks and tests for the evaluation. A pedagogical experiment was conducted while training 115 navigator cadets at National University Odessa Maritime Academy (NU OMA). Its main goal was to find out the dynamics of changes for indicators which answer the quality improvement of educational process through the use of VR. Tracking of this dynamic was done with the use of statistical analysis. VR experiment quantitative and qualitative analyses have confirmed support of the cognitive effort and improvement of memorization of students. He use of VR in the study of navigator cadets significantly increases the overall performance of their learning process. The effect of the user’s presence in the virtual space and the effect of depersonalization and modification of the user’s self-awareness in VR gives unambiguously positive results. Thanks to specialized VR models, navigator cadets can increase the quality of mastering new knowledge by 25,93 %. Due to such improvement of professional training, it is possible to increase the general level of safety during conducting specialized vessel technological operations. The obtained research results are very important in terms of improving the overall safety on marine vessels.