Perception of Students in Virtual Laboratories: The Role of Context

Abstract Laboratory education is one of the bedrocks of engineering education. VR laboratories have been recently introduced into engineering education to offer holistic learning experiences to learners. Although the goal of VR laboratories is to foster improved learning outcomes, its success is dependent on a range of factors. Amongst these factors are students' perceptions of satisfaction, learning effectiveness, and utility value. Also, the role of context, in terms of subject matter and level of difficulty, is important as it serves to inform instructional designers and instructors on implementation strategies for specific course contents. While previous studies have observed positive relationships between learners' perceptions of satisfaction, learner effectiveness, and the utility value of virtual laboratory environments, it is still unknown how this relationship varies across different laboratory environments. It is important that the role of context is understood in the design and development of virtual laboratories as certain designs may be better suited for certain contexts with increased scaffolding required for certain difficulty levels. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of context in virtual laboratory design by measuring differences in learners' perceptions of virtual laboratories focused on different concepts. This study builds on a previous study in which we presented preliminary findings of one of 5 different biomedical engineering virtual laboratories integrated into a Tissue Engineering course. Our guiding research questions are: How did learners' perceptions of the VR labs vary across lab types? To what extent did the perceived utility value and effectiveness of the VR lab modules predict learners' perceived satisfaction with the learning experience across different lab types? Our study adopts a mixed-method design. We conducted an ANOVA test to measure variances across learners' responses to adapted satisfaction, learning effectiveness, and utility value surveys. We carried out a thematic analysis of students' responses to open-ended questions to identify influencing factors for quantitative ratings. We also conducted a regression model to identify the predictive ability of the investigated constructs for perceived satisfaction with the learning experience across each of the laboratories. Our results reveal differing perceptions in learners' qualitative responses regarding the level of difficulty and content of course topics in support of the quantitative findings. These findings shed light on the potential role of context in learners' perception of virtual laboratories highlighting the importance of adapting design strategies in line with specific course content. In ensuring technology-based learning environments are productive, it is important that we consider domain-specific context as a one-size-fits-all would fail to adequately serve our learners. Recommendations and implications of these findings for instructors and instructional designers are discussed.