Perceptions of university students about virtual reality as a didactic resource: a pre-experimental study with a control and experimental group

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study of the impact of incorporating Second Life on the didactics of a university degree subject as well as on student satisfaction, administering a survey to two groups of students enrolled in the same subject through a 24-item questionnaire scored on a 5-point Likert scale for data collection. Subjects comprised 75 students who used the traditional model and 75 students who used a virtual reality model. To verify the hypotheses, the data analysis focused on the descriptive statistics through a comparison of the mean scores for the dependent variables of each of the groups, and with the verification of parametric assumptions, statistical inference was applied to determine the significance of the variances through Student’s t-test. The results show that students perceive specific advantages linked to the design of VR activities in virtual reality. Hence, the potential of virtual reality for improving the teaching process is confirmed. This study leads to the conclusion that students at Universidad Don Bosco greatly value the teaching learning process mediated by virtual reality.