Virtual reality and the simulated experiences for the promotion of entrepreneurial intention: An exploratory contextual study for entrepreneurship education

Digital technologies will dramatically change entrepreneurship education. Virtual Reality (VR) development and its usage in the domain of entrepreneurship education is a pedagogical prelude to a widely-using virtual entrepreneurship teaching, learning and training in near future. The goal of this research is to study the impact of VR technology on the Entrepreneurial Intention (EI) of Iranian university students. Thus, 150 university students were randomly selected. Since this research is a Quasi-experimental study, the students were allocated to two experimental groups and one control group. Initially, the pretests were performed. Then, the first group got VR-based entrepreneurship training, and the second group received traditional teacher-centered entrepreneurship education. After eight-week courses were separately held for each group, the posttests were performed. Later the ANOVA test results revealed significant differences in the EIs among the three groups in the posttests. Further, by applying the Tukey's test, the results demonstrated that the VR-based entrepreneurship training course has had the most effective impact on the students' EIs. The results encourage further using of VR in future entrepreneurship education and its relevant teaching approaches at Shiraz University.