User Experience and Learning Evaluation in Virtual Training of Critical Activities: Case of Live-Line Electrical Substation Maintenance

Introduction

Virtual reality, along with gamification, has played an important role in alternative learning in recent years, especially in the context of critical activities. Activities of this type require a rigorous management process and, due to the danger involved, demand sensitive decisions, especially those that involve risk to people's lives. Similarly, professionals who actually perform critical activities constantly face very complex situations and constantly optimize the decision-making process, otherwise serious impairment can occur. Therefore, recent technological and methodological advances in the area of virtual training have had a great impact on the decision-making process in different professional contexts.

This chapter presents concepts, methods, and tools, resulting from scientific research, related to the learning and training of power substation maintenance activities, and the corresponding validation through tests in the virtual environment developed along a series of R&D projects.

The general benefits of a complementary virtual process include:

• 1.

  safety, since there are no risks and, more precisely, there is no health and life related threat in a virtual environment, as opposed to the traditional maintenance activity;

• 2.

  psychological effects, since trainees know there are no risks involved and they can concentrate solely in the learning process;

• 3.

  logistics, because the actual training process requires special arrangements, favourable weather conditions, the involvement of a whole team of professionals and displacement of people and equipment, whereas the virtual process can be used at any time and can be transported easily;

• 4.

  the innovation of effective learning through the mediation of the virtual reality technology involved.

The most important benefits, however, are related to the improvement of the training process, addressing the following issues:

• 1.

  the fact that the traditional training can only be performed sporadically, at specific occasions, due to the constraints implied in the process, which makes it very difficult for the trainees to recall learning, and thus reducing the effectiveness of the training process;

• 2.

  the use of methods, concepts, and cognitive aspects with great potential to improve the learning process;

• 3.

  risky activities require close attention as they are by nature very dangerous. However, experienced professionals tend to rely on their muscle memory, when they have already mastered the activity to be performed. This may lead to accidents due to minor mistakes. In a virtual environment, error-inducing mechanisms can be used to bring the issue from the muscle memory back to the cognitive system, leading the professional to resume mental processes that were delegated to automatic reasoning, thus preventing errors that could lead to serious accidents.

The immersive virtual environment developed along a series of R&D projects is the basis for the research work described here and relies on a few concepts that address learning factors not normally dealt with in traditional training processes and, thus, providing an alternative learning experience capable of a greater degree of knowledge retention, exploring motivation as a key element, which can ultimately result not only in better quality of services but also make a positive contribution to workplace security in the relevant field.

Another important feature a virtual learning system must come up with is an adequate means of assessing the effectiveness of learning. However, learning evaluation is not a simple task, and it normally considers the progress the learner has made since the beginning of the training. Automatic evaluation is presented to the user as part of the gamification process. Leaderboards are one of the gamification elements players appreciate. Having their scores displayed leads to an increased motivation to carry on until they reach the desired level.