The reality of COVID-19 public health concerns and increasing demand for distance education have forced educators to move to online delivery of their courses. Particularly in construction education, the majority of physical location-based educational activities (e.g., labs, site visits, or field trips) have been canceled during the pandemic that results in reducing students’ engagement, learning motivation, and cognitive achievement. Virtual Social Spaces (VSS) with innovative interaction affordances and immersive experience are well poised to supplement current online construction education. This paper discusses the potentials of VSS for construction education while focusing on the common applications of VSS, the communication and collaboration affordances of VSS, and design principles of this technology based on 15 popular VSS platforms. Overall, VSS applications are mainly found in education, entertainment, and socializing. The main communication and collaboration affordances of VSS include avatars, multi-user support, asynchronous commenting, synchronous chat, and visual-sharing affordances. These technical features illustrate the potentials of VSS for improving online construction education quality, eliminating the challenges associated with geographical dispersion of students, and decreasing the students’ lack of engagement.
- Award ID(s):
- 1821852
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10286548
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 ASCE Construction Research Congress (CRC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 782 to 790
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
-
more » « less
Field trips are widely recognized as an essential educational component to connect classrooms with the real world. When students don’t have access to real field trips, virtual ones have been developed by educators and researchers. Pedagogical agents have been applied to serve as a tour guide and educational tool that facilitate students learning in a virtual learning environment. Such agents are computer software generated and controlled entities that replicate or emulate humans. Previous studies have found that adding anthropomorphic traits to pedagogical agents in learning environments has significantly improved students’ learning experience; however, this area has yet been explored in the context of a virtual construction field trip. In this study, a virtual field trip to a complex mechanical room was developed using 360-degree panoramas and a pedagogical agent was employed to lead the tour. This study focuses on one single anthropomorphic trait - deictic gestures, which are pointing gestures used to refer to specific objects – and explores how such trait affects students’ quantitative learning outcomes and feedbacks on four aspects of the agent, including facilitating learning, credibility, human-like, and engaging. It was found that deictic gestures can improve students’ learning performance and attitudes on multiple aspects of the agent.
-
more » « less
Virtual and immersive virtual reality, VR and iVR, provide flexible and engaging learning opportunities, such as virtual field trips (VFTs). Despite its growing popularity for education, understanding how iVR compared to non-immersive media influences learning is still challenged by mixed empirical results and a lack of longitudinal research. This study addresses these issues through an experiment in which undergraduate geoscience students attended two temporally separated VFT sessions through desktop virtual reality (dVR) or iVR, with their learning experience and outcomes measured after each session. Our results show higher levels of enjoyment and satisfaction as well as a stronger sense of spatial presence in iVR students in both VFTs compared to dVR students, but no improvement in learning outcomes in iVR compared to dVR. More importantly, we found that there exists a critical interaction between VR condition and repeated participation in VFTs indicating that longitudinal exposure to VFTs improves knowledge performance more when learning in iVR than through dVR. These results suggest that repeated use of iVR may be beneficial in sustaining students’ emotional engagement and compensating the initial deficiency in their objective learning outcomes compared to other less immersive technologies.
-
more » « less
Site visits or field trips are widely recognized by construction educators to engage students in active learning, supplement traditional lessons, and achieve better student learning experiences. However, site visits pose significant logistical and accessibility challenges for educational institutions and teachers, limiting the number of students who can benefit from them. Moreover, the restrictions on site visits have widened recently, as the reality of COVID-19 public health concerns have compelled instructors to fast-transition to online course delivery, canceling most site visits. The purpose of this study is to present construction students with online site visits to supplement contextualized learning in risky, unsafe, or impossible-to-achieve situations. In this project, Mozilla Hubs® was used to establish a virtual collaborative environment that resembled a real-world site visit to a building facility. A pilot study (i.e., a plan-reading assessment) was employed within the virtual environment that provided affordances involving an in-depth learning experience through collaborative communication. The findings demonstrate that virtual collaborative site visits give unique chances to deliver spatiotemporal contexts of sites online and provide an effective remote alternative when these learning opportunities are unavailable.
-
null (Ed.)COVID-19 has altered the landscape of teaching and learning. For those in in-service teacher education, workshops have been suspended causing programs to adapt their professional development to a virtual space to avoid indefinite postponement or cancellation. This paradigm shift in the way we conduct learning experiences creates several logistical and pedagogical challenges but also presents an important opportunity to conduct research about how learning happens in these new environments. This paper describes the approach we took to conduct research in a series of virtual workshops aimed at teaching rural elementary teachers about engineering practices and how to teach a unit from an engineering curriculum. Our work explores how engineering concepts and practices are socially constructed through interactions with teachers, students, and artifacts. This approach, called interactional ethnography has been used by the authors and others to learn about engineering teaching and learning in precollege classrooms. The approach relies on collecting data during instruction, such as video and audio recordings, interviews, and artifacts such as journal entries and photos of physical designs. Findings are triangulated by analyzing these data sources. This methodology was going to be applied in an in-person engineering education workshop for rural elementary teachers, however the pandemic forced us to conduct the workshops remotely. Teachers, working in pairs, were sent workshop supplies, and worked together during the training series that took place over Zoom over four days for four hours each session. The paper describes how we collected video and audio of teachers and the facilitators both in whole group and in breakout rooms. Class materials and submissions of photos and evaluations were managed using Google Classroom. Teachers took photos of their work and scanned written materials and submitted them all by email. Slide decks were shared by the users and their group responses were collected in real time. Workshop evaluations were collected after each meeting using Google Forms. Evaluation data suggest that the teachers were engaged by the experience, learned significantly about engineering concepts and the knowledge-producing practices of engineers, and feel confident about applying engineering activities in their classrooms. This methodology should be of interest to the membership for three distinct reasons. First, remote instruction is a reality in the near-term but will likely persist in some form. Although many of us prefer to teach in person, remote learning allows us to reach many more participants, including those living in remote and rural areas who cannot easily attend in-person sessions with engineering educators, so it benefits the field to learn how to teach effectively in this way. Second, it describes an emerging approach to engineering education research. Interactional ethnography has been applied in precollege classrooms, but this paper demonstrates how it can also be used in teacher professional development contexts. Third, based on our application of interactional ethnography to an education setting, readers will learn specifically about how to use online collaborative software and how to collect and organize data sources for research purposes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784482872.085
