Virtual reality (VR) can foster Flow Experiences (FE) and promote students’ knowledge and understanding. Designing, developing, and applying VR-based courses represent key strategies for the digital transformation of higher education and improved talent cultivation. Using the person–artifact–task model, this study maps flow antecedents to interactions between person, artefact, and task, rather than treating them as independent variables, setting Technical Knowledge Preparation (TKP), Perceived Usefulness (PU), and Sense of Task Control (SoTC) as key antecedents of flow formation. A questionnaire survey was administered to 164 undergraduate students from China’s local universities to explore these antecedents. The results revealed that the students’ FE in VR-based learning environments were suboptimal, indicating the need for further improvement. PU was the most significant positive influencing factor affecting flow formation. Meanwhile, SoTC and TKP also had positive effects on the flow formation but did not reach statistical significance. Notably, for students with prior experience of using VR, TKP exerted a significant positive predictive effect on FE. Male students exhibited a significantly higher SoTC compared with female students, resulting in a weak negative correlation between SoTC and FE. These findings expand the understanding of pre-factors of flow formation in technology-supported environments. Learners are more concerned with PU than SoTC. In-depth integration of information technology and course content is more important for flow formation than balancing between task difficulty and learners’ ability.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.