Educational use of virtual reality technologies in engineering education: The impact of the digital generation of faculty
摘要
Virtual reality (VR) is an effective technology when applied to higher education. A fruitful line of research is the study of the reception of VR by the agents involved, especially professors. This provides keys to help universities and countries, especially developing ones, in the process of digital integration. In this work, a quantitative analysis of the influence of the digital generation of engineering professors on their assessments of the didactic use of VR is carried out. For this, a validated questionnaire has been passed to a sample of 312 engineering professors from the Latin American region, whose responses have been statistically analyzed. It is found that digital native professors report better skills than digital immigrants but give lower ratings to the didactic aspects of VR than digital immigrants. It has been also shown that the influence of the digital generation on the ratings is strongly dependent on the gender of the participants. As a conclusion, it is necessary to increase the digital training of professors in the region and strengthen female access to technologies. It is suggested that protocols be designed to promote the use of VR in an egalitarian way, especially among digital immigrants.