The Higher Education Sustainability through Virtual Laboratories: The Spanish University as Case of Study

Abstract

Education has been integrated into the globalization process supported by technological advances such as e-learning. The sustainability of the universities is one of the key points of the university survival, and they strongly depend on the number of students that can enroll in them. Thus, many of the educational institutions have had to develop their curricula based on the use new technologies. Without a doubt, virtual laboratories are the latest technology in this regard. The objective of this work is to determine which are the main institutions and research trends in relation to virtual laboratories. The methodology followed in this research was to perform a bibliometric analysis of the whole scientific production indexed in Scopus. The world’s scientific production has been analysed in the following domains: first the trend over time, types of publications and countries, second the main subjects and keywords, third main institutions and their main topics, and fourth the main journals and proceedings that publish on this topic. After that, a case study was analysed in detailed as a representative country (Spain). The most productive institution in this field, Universidad de Educación a Distancia (UNED). If the ranking is established by average citations per published paper, the first three institutions are from the USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Washington (Seattle), and Carnegie Mellon University. The scientific categories at world level and in the case of study are similar. First, there is the field of engineering followed by computer science and above all it highlights the wide spectrum of branches of knowledge in which this topic is published, which indicates the great acceptance of this teaching methodology in all fields of education. Finally, community detection has been applied to the case study and six clusters have been found: Virtual Reality, Users, E-learning, Programming, Automatic-robotics, Computer Simulation and Engineering Education. As a main conclusion, bibliographic analysis confirms that research in virtual laboratories is a very active field, where scientific productivity has exponentially increased over recent years in tandem with universities growth. Therefore, expectations are high in this field for the near future. The possibility of virtual laboratories opens up new perspectives for higher education sustainability, where the educational policies of countries could be reoriented.

The Emergence of Technology in Physical Education: A General Bibliometric Analysis with a Focus on Virtual and Augmented Reality

“…The second-largest network was related to the introduction of simulation in schools using the Markov process. Another of the larger networks referred to the use of technology in orientation at a university level, which was in line with the bibliometric analysis of Salmerón-Manzano and Manzano-Agugliaro [39] that focused on the use of technology at a university level. Another network was related to the interventions with the aim of improving sport habits, which was in line with the second line of the general search.…”

“…In fact, with an increasing number of technologies available, physical educators have begun to explore applications of technology related to physical education environments [1]. However, while there has been an increase in support and research on the integration of technology and training into general teacher education, there are not enough research and programming efforts related to the integration of laboratories [39], no specific analysis was found within the field of PE. The bibliometric studies carried out on the use of technology in PE were carried out from the perspective of information and communication technology (ICT) [40], as well as VR [37].…”

Students’ Acceptance and Tracking of a New Container-Based Virtual Laboratory

“…In this context, it is clear that infrastructures such as virtual and remote laboratories, which are being widely used presently, must be analyzed for determining their pros and cons regarding those objectives. Besides those technologies, various successful tools aimed at promoting meaningful learning in the field of cybersecurity can be found in the literature [4][5][6].Additionally, virtual laboratories are presently contributing to the sustainability of higher education, even more when the learning methodology is on distance [7]. This is the particular case of UNED, in which the number of students enrolled in the virtual platform of a subject may become very high.…”

Incorporating Virtual Reality into the Teaching and Training of Grid-Tie Photovoltaic Power Plants Design

“…The literature reports significant advances in this direction. Hence, VR has been explored in many topics including tourism [6,7], medicine [8], improving creativity [9,10], and in engineering [11,12]. Thus, allowing the students and trainers to attract their attention, breaking the monotony of classical teaching, learning concepts or processes to solve problems, provide maintenance, and implementing practices in a safe environment, as if the students were immersed in the industry.…”