This chapter analyses the use of the virtual reality (VR) digital tool in the processes of university orientation, especially for those degrees that have important training on technologies in their curricula. To do so, a study on pre-college students through an experience with digital tools, like the use of VR headsets, was done. After that, the students completed a questionnaire to assess this activity. A total of 3,680 satisfaction surveys were taken, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The obtained data demonstrate that when the satisfaction degree increases with the activity, the rate of students who eventually choose technological degrees like Digital Business improves.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, there are several applications and technological tools that aim at developing capabilities and skills for students, whether cognitive or digital, especially useful for the changes that the new disruptive scenarios have brought.
Concretely, for some time there has been evidence of the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) in education. And it is because education represents one of the most interesting sectors for the design and use of RV applications, due mainly to its capability to introduce the student to immersive and multisensory environments, in which they can interact in an artificial context that stimulates their learning process.
In this way, Jiménez et al. (2019) point out that VR has become one of the most emerging technologies that have revolutionized experiential and active teaching and learning through the experiential participation assumed by students.
Among other skills and competencies, these new tools allow to empower critical thinking, creativity digital alphabetization, and multimedia production in students. Nevertheless, these digital instruments can also be used for university orientation, aimed at choosing higher education studies.
This paper focuses precisely on the orientation process that ESIC University carries out with the high school students that visit the university along the academic year. These visits' aim is that the students have a college experience, working for a day as if they were real undergraduates. This day, students experience how is a class, solving in teams a case prepared ad hoc and preparing a group presentation of the given solutions for that case. The aim is to introduce them to the didactic methodology of challenge-based learning (CBL), by which, students analyze a problem of their environment and propose ideas in an autonomous way that can make solve it.
Besides, and as a part of this visit, pre-university students have the opportunity to visit the virtual space called ESIC TECH, a classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, destined to test new VR and immersive digital tools, 5G technologies, 3D impression, besides presenting them with essential aspects of the use of robotics in business and social environments. In this leg of the day, students can test VR headsets under the supervision of professors and professionals. These glasses have content that allows, among other options, present products, and brands in an impact way, through pictures and 360º videos. Moreover, among the content proposals, students can take virtual tours, that make them acquire a closer knowledge of the possibilities of this technology and get inspiration on how to use this methodology differently in other business or social scenarios.
It was precisely this visit to the ESIC TECH facilities that inspired this chapter. This paper aims to analyze whether through this immersive experience of the high school students, from their interaction with these new technologies, and concretely with VR, on the one hand, makes increase the satisfaction rate with the visit, and on the other hand, if this experience makes increase their interest on the university degrees whose curricula have a bigger content in technological traits, and if this can provoke a higher number of tuition reservations.
To find evidence on these hypotheses a quantitative study with the students of first and second year of high school who came to the ESIC university orientation sessions has been done. The study has been carried out during the academic years of 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, two significant periods due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that deprived several students of having the immersive experience in situ. In this way, if during the course 2019/2020 a total of 3,060 students visited the university, in the course 2020/2021 they were 620, what makes a significant decrease. Nevertheless, and despite this fall, the satisfaction rates are still high, because they did not go below a rating of 9.4 out of 10.
These results could have implications about orienting the students to choose their college studies. On the one hand, using VR can improve the results of the orientation tests and provide students a closer experience to their future profession. This way, the interest of the high school students to study at ESIC University can be increased, and the university dropout percentage can be reduced. The main limitations of the study come precisely from the lack of studies on the phenomenon, and the possibility to extend the results obtained to the great offer of university degrees existing nowadays.