Immersive virtual reality for procedural training: comparing traditional and learning by teaching approaches

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely adopted for the creation of training experiences, since it appears to allow overcoming, especially for practical training, some of the limitations of real exercises. Many previous works focused on investigating the effectiveness of VR Training Systems (VRTS) in a variety of fields, but the efficacy of these systems is very task-dependent, and the best way to integrate them into existing learning paths has yet to be thoroughly investigated. The goal of the present paper is to explore the latter aspects considering a case study in the context of energy management in industry, and focusing on a measuring procedure that is part, e.g., of energy audit inspections. To this aim, a VRTS was developed and used to conduct two user studies: a first study designed to investigate the effectiveness of the devised system when used as an alternative or in combination with lecture and laboratory-based teaching experiences, and a second study aimed to compare two different approaches (traditional learning, TL, and learning by teaching, LBT) for exploiting the provided VR-based functionalities in a learning path. Experimental results showed that the use of the VRTS alone improved the participants’ performance compared to traditional experiences, and that LBT proved to be more effective that TL for practical learning purposes.