Immersive Virtual Reality Technology for Teaching Marketing in Higher Education

In the modern digital world, learning technologies are subject to rapid changes, which help stimulate students’ cognitive interests and increase their motivation to learn. Learning technologies in the foreseeable future will be associated with the use of multimedia resources, and this is a new immersive approach to learning, which defines augmented and virtual reality as an environment with direct or indirect addition of digital data to the physical world in real time using appropriate computer hardware and software. The use of augmented and virtual reality technology allows us to achieve a higher degree of integration of the virtual world with the real one. In the future the immersive approach as an innovative trend in modern education will be actively used at all levels of the education system and in all its segments and will use the potentials of virtual and augmented reality. The key stages of the research include the review of the theoretical foundations of the relevance of the immersive approach to teaching students of marketing, an analysis of virtual reality technologies. The authors carried out an assessment of the readiness of teaching staff to use immersive technology-based teaching activities and a self-assessment of students’ engagement in the virtual reality learning environment. The development of a virtual reality technology-based model and scenario-based immersive learning template using virtual and augmented reality technologies in marketing classes comprises the scientific novelty of the research. The findings show that the concept of an immersive learning with virtual reality technology is realistic and effective subject to technical support for the learning process; methodological solution in the field of helping teachers adapt to new technologies and be ready to use them in the educational environment. As the experiment showed, the teachers’ motivational level for learning to work with virtual reality technologies and the level of interest in using them are high (0.99 → 1). An assessment undertaken during the experiment showed a high degree of students’ engagement and motivation.