Impact of the Digitalization Level on the Assessment of Virtual Reality in Higher Education

Introduction

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced governments and administrations around the world to adopt restrictions on physical contact and mobility that particularly affected the education sector and, specifically, higher education (Sabu, 2020). Thus, a significant proportion of university students had to give up participation in face-to-face training activities and their professors had to look for methodological strategies and resources suited to a non-face-to-face teaching scenario (Vital-López, 2022).

In this situation, professors had to suddenly strengthen the presence of digital learning environments and technologies that would allow students to develop the appropriate competences and keep alive the motivation and involvement of students with learning activities (Tejedor et al., 2020). In this sense, virtual reality (VR) technologies are among the tools that have proven to provide the best results (Nesenbergs, 2021). Indeed, these technologies allow immersion in simulated but realistic environments that help to visualize possibly complex three-dimensional objects –such as those presented, for example, in medical (Barteit et al., 2021), art, or architecture classrooms (Özgen et al., 2021)– and interact with them, thus virtually simulating laboratory activities –which is of great interest in science and engineering education (Vergara, Fernández-Arias et al., 2021).

VR technologies have proven to be well adapted to the academic requirements of different areas of knowledge and to the demands of non-face-to-face education (Lamb et al., 2019). However, they pose important limitations, such as technological infrastructure needs (Luo et al., 2021; Marks & Thomas, 2022), digital competence and faculty training (Cabero-Almenara et al., 2021), or the adaptation of professors to this type of environment (Antón-Sancho, Vergara, & Fernández-Arias, 2022). These limitations give rise to numerous gaps in the use and perception of VR technologies for various reasons, including cultural, gender or age (Vergara, Antón-Sancho et al., 2021). Due to the growing trend for the virtualization of educational environments and, in general, for the educational metaverse (Antón-Sancho & Sánchez-Calvo, 2022; Vergara-Rodríguez et al., 2022), the literature reflects the current interest in exploring the opinions of professors and students about the didactic use of these technologies –identifying the factors influencing these opinions –, because this can provide keys to improve faculty training in this regard (Vergara, Fernández-Arias et al., 2021; Vergara, Fernández-Arias et al., 2022).

Given the interest of this line of work, this study focuses on the perceptions about the didactic use of VR technologies of university professors, analyzing for this purpose a sample of 1234 professors from the Latin American and Caribbean region. Specifically, the influence of the level of technological and digital development of the country on the perceptions expressed is analyzed quantitatively. This level of development has been measured through the Global Innovation Index (WIPO, 2021). Specifically, conclusions are drawn about the behavior of gender and age gaps in perceptions of VR as a function of the level of digital development and some recommendations and lines of research are suggested based on the results.