The presence of modern immersive technology, such as VR and AR, has attracted global attention of education sectors in the past few decades. The utilization of these technologies has brought educational transformation in the teaching pedagogy and practices, especially since the term “education metaverse” was introduced. Over the commercially available digital learning technologies, metaverse-immersive technology offers numerous benefits for teaching and learning activities, including the sense of presence, full immersion in the learning content, and distraction-free environment. Given the many potentials of immersive technology, the work presents a preliminary study of using Mixed Reality (MR) immersive learning scenarios within the Higher Education context, built for Microsoft HoloLens 2 MR devices. Student evaluation parameters, i.e., student attitudes towards technology and technology-enhanced learning, student learning experiences using various digital learning technologies, and student perspective on immersive education are investigated in this study. Qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed by using statistical approaches of one-way ANOVA and correlation analysis which aim to observe whether student attitudes have effects on the overall learning experience. Results demonstrate that the student participants have generally positive attitudes towards technology-enhanced learning and are strongly supportive of using immersive technology for learning purposes. It is also worth highlighting that lab-based training, interactive problem-solving class, and business-based workshop are the three top-rated learning activities based on the suitability and importance of VR/AR/MR technology applications.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, HEI-A, the first Sino-foreign university in China, has been committed to digital transformation and increasing its technological capabilities and online provisions. At the forefront is Virtual Reality (VR), which is becoming more affordable and accessible. Immersive VR (iVR) is often referred to as the ultimate version of VR, and can be enhanced through sensory interfaces, such as audio and haptic. The present paper describes an iVR pilot study based on the virtual experiences of Design History, developed by UNIT-A, a special division within HEI-A that focuses on digital pedagogy, and HEI-A’s BEng UGP-A program. The study explores student preferences regarding interaction interfaces and presentation types for learning content within iVR environments. Results show that interaction interface types play a pivotal role in immersion and engagement within these environments, and that learning content utilising microlearning and/or gamification elements are preferred.

Increasing demands and needs of utilizing Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have pushed many commercial and non-commercial industries and institutions to innovate, including in the education sector. This paper presents a preliminary study of understanding the perception of undergraduate Architecture students in the first Sino-Foreign University in China of various design features. These features were selected on the basis of their functionalities in the VR environment development context, e.g. a VR scene or site that can be visited as part of the learning process within the discipline. Hence, the participants were asked to evaluate the importance of each design feature, after experiencing a VR scene created under a university-scale project, namely V-ROOM. Results obtained from this study are hoped to provide future recommendations for numerous stakeholders working in or pursuing the architecture field, including students, educators, and architects. It is interesting to find that amongst fourteen design features investigated in this work, collaborative real-time editing, object/model scaling, and texture modification appeared to receive the highest ratings from the participants, and hence are the most crucial features to be considered in the design process. Furthermore, correlation matrix is also produced to investigate the relationship between these features.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies have expanded their domain of application towards education, offering various pedagogical advantages such as an immersive environment, teaching innovation, and in-depth user engagement by allowing the students to experience real-life scenarios of the taught subject through virtual simulations. Motion sickness, as one of the long-standing key challenges of VR utilization, even in gaming, often becomes a barrier for VR users to fully engage with the content developed in the virtual world. Thus, this work presents a preliminary study on understanding the symptoms of motion sickness — which will be referred to later as ‘cybersickness’ — in the teaching and learning (T&L) context.

In today’s digital era, the number of digital artefacts produced by students in universities around the world continues to rise. This paper describes a project that developed a digital artefacts platform to showcase students’ projects at an international level, aiming to increase the visibility of students’ work to global audiences. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a large proportion of the software engineering project development took place remotely, with students and staff at University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), a Sino-foreign Higher Education Institution in Mainland China, adopting remote collaboration tools and techniques. This paper presents the background, software engineering development, and the project’s unique characteristics. In addition, the challenges to project completion and remote collaboration, future recommendations, and the potential to extend this project into an Open Educational Resource (OER) are also discussed.