Investigating How to Optimize Immersive Virtual Field Trips in Geography Education

Abstract

Geography education is related not only to geographical expertise but also to students' ability to communicate with peers and tutors and understand the immediate environment. Geoscience fieldwork is crucial to help learners gain geographical expertise and increase their interactions with peers and tutors. However, in traditional geography teaching activities, there is usually no chance for students to have a field trip about the topics. This usually results in a low understanding of geographic Knowledge and limited interaction with peers. Therefore, the present study attempts to adopt an immersive virtual field trip approach to enable students to have an embodied learning experience and some collaborative learning strategies to facilitate their peer interaction. Based on this approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted to compare the effects of the proposed approach and the conventional technology-supported approach in a high school geography class in Germany. The findings show that the proposed immersive virtual field trip approach significantly improved students' peer interaction and students' collaboration tendencies, and also enhance media support. While the proposed approach did not significantly improve teacher-student interaction and achievements, the interview results show that the students perceived the approach as being effective from the perspectives of “responsible and enjoyable”, “understandable and productive”, “better visualization” and “easy communication”.