The Use of Virtual Reality in Geo-Education

Abstract

The paper discusses the technological capabilities of virtual reality (VR) in the field of education as a highly developed form of computer modeling. VR is con-sidered to be able to revolutionize the education field since it provides better en-gagement in learning activities than other teaching methods. In order to study the impact of VR technology on ensuring the quality of e-learning, an experiment is conducted during the Physical Geography online course. The current research in-volves 60 third-year students from the Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical Uni-versity, Moscow Pedagogical State University, and Ajman University. All the re-spondents were divided into two groups. The training of the first group is under-gone through distance learning in the Moodle e-learning system, while the educa-tional process of the second is supplemented with the technological capabilities of the latest VR services (Google Earth, Apple Maps, My Way VR, The VR Muse-um of Fine Art). During the study, students’ subjective assessment of the training is performed according to the basic, expected, and desirable criteria. The exami-nation is carried out in two stages - before and after the course. At the first stage of the assessment, the use of VR corresponds to the desired quality of the educa-tional product. However, after the course and the acquiring of virtual experience, the transfer of the students' desired training criteria into the expected can be ob-served. This indicates a high degree of adaptability of VR technology in educa-tion as well as an increase in the respondents' requirements against the quality of subsequent training courses. Consequently, a significant impact of immersive technology's evolution on the demands on the e-learning quality can be noted.

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Educational Game for Learning Topology Relations at Schools: A Case Study

“…Although various literature has studied the adoption of different technologies such as VR in education, few papers have aimed at teaching geospatial subjects. The authors of [33,34] tried to explore the potentialities of VR in geo-education. The authors of [33] used Google Earth VR during a physical geography course to investigate geographical objects in 3D form; their findings confirmed that VR is highly adaptable of achieving teaching purposes.…”

“…The authors of [33,34] tried to explore the potentialities of VR in geo-education. The authors of [33] used Google Earth VR during a physical geography course to investigate geographical objects in 3D form; their findings confirmed that VR is highly adaptable of achieving teaching purposes. The authors of [35] evaluated the spatial skills of students by using a VR application that provided mental rotation tests.…”

Improvement of English Communication Ability with Virtual Scenes Based on Electronic Schoolbag

“…Learning center is composed of two parts: teaching tools and rich media. The virtual teaching and learning tools are mainly to digitize the traditional paper textbooks [14][15][16][17][18][19], and the rich media are sub-divided into four parts: images, texts, audios, and videos. With the help of this module, the teaching contents can be displayed for students in the forms of images, texts, audios, and videos more vividly, and it can enrich students' audiovisual experience, and inspire their interest; at the same time, this part can create virtual scenes that seamlessly connect the real scenes so that the teaching activities can be carried out in the corresponding teaching scenes to improve the teaching efficiency.…”

Virtual Globe

“…Apart from geospatial applications, virtual environments also play an instrumental role in geo-education (Shakirova et al 2020). VR is considered one of the effective emerging technologies that can be used in STEM education.…”