Self-Paced Learning in Virtual Worlds: Opportunities of an Immersive Learning Environment

Digitalisation in education is inevitable and must be driven forward even more consistently. Accordingly, the current COVID 19 pandemic further underlines and accelerates this necessity. Instead of persistently philosophising about infrastructure and learning platforms, teachers and students are suddenly confronted directly with digital teaching and e-learning. Among technologies for digitalization there is one with a huge potential in the course of digitalisation in education, namely Virtual Reality (VR). VR can be applied as a powerful and multifunctional tool for accessing problems usually considered as hard to taggle. For education, VR can create a connection between abstract theory and real-world scenarios and makes the presentation of facts and applications tangible for students. In addition to a theoretical and literature-based consideration of VR in the concepts of e-learning and blended learning, this paper presents the integration of learning content based on VR through the LMS platform OPAL and discusses the achieved results. Linking to this, an additional chapter will discuss the promotion of the learning process through an immersive learning environment, i.e., what opportunities and challenges arise. The idea and implementation of a virtual research lab modelled based on the physical Industry 4.0 research lab by Professor Christoph Laroque and his Team Industry Analytics is intended to highlight the possibilities and potential of an immersive environment and provide an outlook for future work. This paper addresses the questions to what extent and in which context an immersive learning environment can be more effective than traditional face-to-face learning environments in courses and seminars. Furthermore, challenges and difficulties regarding the use of immersive learning environments from the projects experience will be described. Thoughts and ideas on how these challenges and difficulties can be overcome sum up the considerations within this paper.