Application Research and Teaching Reform Practice of Virtual Reality Technology in Open Education Teaching Mode

Since the establishment of the university, “openness” is one of its basic characteristics, whether it is the ancient Chinese Zhuzi Hundred Schools, the Jixia School Palace and the Academy, or the Western Ancient Greek period of the wise debate and school garden discussion, the ancient Roman period of the University of Bologna’s teacher-student contract, all of them show the characteristics of openness in terms of students, teachers’ sources, school relations, and ideological expression. All universities are open systems, universities as a form of organization in society, with other social organizations that constitute the university environment for a variety of material exchanges, such as people, money, materials, etc., between them and the university environment are “open”.

With the acceleration of the process of modernization in education, information technology has gradually been integrated into the education system, which has significantly changed the traditional education and teaching modes. Open education is a new form of education based on network technology for knowledge transmission and learning in a state of relative separation of “teaching” and “learning” in space and time. With the in-depth development of information technology, the specific form of distance and open education has undergone phased development and evolution, the communication media has changed from traditional radio, television and other media to virtual reality (VR), etc., and the practice form has changed from “teaching-oriented” to “teaching integration”.

VR teaching objectives, as the basis of teaching activities in the VR teaching mode, are divided into three levels of objectives, the next level of objectives is the concretization of the previous level of objectives, and the previous level of objectives provides guidance for the realization of the next level of objectives.In the process of VR teaching, the realization of each objective will become the basis of the VR teaching objectives. Cultivating students’ active participation requires educators’ careful cultivation and guidance. The construction of the model cannot be separated from the theoretical foundation, and the teaching theory is not only the foundation of the model construction, but also the necessary support for the model construction. Based on the ARCS learning model, this study designs the goals and tasks of students’ learning, and establishes a link between students’ new and original knowledge, explicit and implicit knowledge, so that students’ attention (A) can be mobilized and students’ learning motivation can be promoted, so that learning relevance (R) can be actively constructed. Guided by the activity theory, we carefully design teaching tasks and gradually maintain the students’ mental state of positive, active, inquiry and cooperation in the learning process through the completion of the tasks, and enhance self-confidence (C), so as to improve the learning efficiency of students. At the same time, using the theory of situated cognition, various types of virtualized situations are integrated into VR, so that students can actively construct knowledge and actively participate in the tasks in the immersive, virtualized and interactive environment, and finally provide feedback on the tasks completed by the learners, and the learners can seriously reflect and gain a sense of satisfaction (S). Realization conditions provide hardware and software support for the VR teaching and learning process, and how learning is facilitated through the use of a variety of hard and software devices is one of the factors for successful VR. These devices usually contain teaching tools (smart mobile terminals), teaching environment (VR learning environment), VR technology (computer simulation technology) and teaching resources (VR learning resources), which are usually activated at the beginning of the VR and then used during the lesson.The VR teaching process is divided into three parts, namely pre-class pre-study, in-class exploration and post-class reflection, and there are basic steps for each stage The educators can make corresponding adjustments according to the content of specific subjects to meet the teaching needs.VR teaching evaluation, in the assessment process, this paper will use formative and summative assessment, so as to assess students’ learning more objectively and ensure the completeness of the assessment. On the basis of the above theoretical research, this paper constructs an open education teaching model in the VR environment, and the teaching model is constructed as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Construction of VR classroom teaching mode

In order to accurately represent the experimental document, the statistically based approach requires the whole text to be subdivided into words, which will determine the frequency of occurrence of each word. Words are the smallest, independently movable, meaningful linguistic components. All linguistic knowledge of computers comes from machine dictionaries (which give information about each of the words), syntactic rules (which describe the phenomenon of word aggregation in terms of various combinations of word classes), and semantic and contextual knowledge bases about words and sentences.

The idea of N-Gram statistical computational language modeling is that the occurrence of a word is closely related to the sequence of words occurring in its contextual environment, and the occurrence of the nth word is only related to the previous n-1 words and not to any other words, let W1W2W3…Wn be a string of words of length n, then the likelihood of the string W is represented by an equation shown in equation (1): 1P(W)=∏i=1np(wi/wi−n+1wi−n+2...wi−1)

It is easy to see that in order to predict the probability of occurrence of the word Wn, the probability of occurrence of all the words preceding it must be known. Computationally, this approach is too complex. The problem can be greatly simplified if the probability of occurrence of Wi is related only to the two words that precede it. The language model at this point is called a ternary model, as shown in equation (2): 2P(W)≈P(w1)P(w2/w1)Πi=3...nP(wi/wi−2wi−1)

In general, the N-tuple model is the assumption that the probability of occurrence of the current word is only related to the N-1 words that precede it. It is important that these probability parameters are computable from large-scale corpora, such as the ternary probability as shown in Equation (3): 3P(wi/wi−2wi−1)≈count(wi−2wi−1w1)count(wi−2wi−1)

The open education model based on VR technology constructed above was applied to a university for implementation, and the correctness of its teaching model was verified after a seven-week teaching experiment. A questionnaire was used to measure the students’ reflective ability, and after the collected data were organized, the data were analyzed using SPSS 26.0. Before the beginning of the teaching experiment, the students in the two classes of the experimental class (open education model based on VR technology) and the control class (traditional teaching model) were tested, and the two classes used the same set of test questions, which were divided into single-choice and fill-in-the-blanks questions, totaling one hundred points, and at the end of the teaching experiment, the test papers were distributed again to the students of the experimental class and the control class, and the two classes used the same set of test questions, which were divided into single multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, two types of questions, a total of one hundred points, and the distribution of scores is the same as the pre-test questionnaire to ensure the validity of the test.

This part is mainly to statistically analyze the experimental pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control classes, and the results are shown in Table 2.

In the pre-test scores of the experimental and control classes, the mean values of the students’ scores were 74.98 and 74.22, and the difference between the mean scores of the two classes was extremely small, which could indicate that the overall difference in the scores of the two classes before the teaching experiment was relatively small. The test of variance equivalence has a significance value of 0.211 > 0.05, indicating homogeneity of the variance. It indicates that the variance in reflective skills between the two classes before the experiment started was not significant. In the post-test scores of the experimental and control classes, the mean values of the students’ scores are 82.43 and 75.94, and the mean scores of the two classes have been separated by a certain distance, which is able to indicate that the difference in the overall scores of the two classes is relatively large after the teaching experiment. The significance value of the variance equivalence test is 0.042 < 0.05, and the difference in the academic achievement ability of the two classes after the teaching experiment is significant. In the pre- and post-test scores of the experimental class, the mean values of the students’ scores were 74.98 and 82.43, and the difference in the mean scores was larger than that of the control class, which could indicate that the overall achievement of the experimental class was on the rise after the teaching experiment.

This part mainly focuses on the statistical analysis of the pre- and post-test scores of the experimental class before and after the experiment, and the statistical analysis of the data is shown in Table 3. After the one-sample t-test of the pre- and post-test scores of the experimental class, the P-value of the pre- and post-test scores is 0.001<0.05, which indicates that there is a significant difference between the scores of the experimental class after the teaching experiment and those before the teaching experiment, i.e., after the teaching of the open education teaching mode in the VR environment, the teaching of open education teaching mode is able to improve the students’ academic performance. The results show that the application of open education teaching mode in VR environments is generally good. Students’ participation in the classroom has improved, and their attention is more focused. Students’ interest in the teaching content and learning process increases when they use the teaching mode under the guidance of teachers, and they think that this kind of teaching mode, which allows them to experience, observe and operate, is more interesting than only explaining by teachers or playing videos.

In order to understand the degree of achievement and differences between the open education classroom based on VR technology and the traditional open education classroom in the four deep-level teaching goals of attention, relevance, self-confidence, and satisfaction, the data recovered from the questionnaires of the students who participated in the experiment were statistically analyzed, and the results are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3.

The experimental group was compared with the control group

Attention level test results: after SPSS variance chi-square test, the overall variance of the two groups where the data are located is chi-square. Each of the 10 students in the experimental group and the control group has a T-test value of 5.373 in the attention of learning motivation, corresponding to a P-value of 0.032, and since 0.032<0.05, it indicates that there is a significant difference between the students of the experimental group (mean value of 40.025) and the control group (mean value of 31.225) in the level of attention after the experiment, which shows that the VR open education teaching mode in the process of open education classroom is conducive to stimulating and maintaining students’ attention.

The t-test value at the level of learning motivation relevance is 2.776, and the corresponding p-value is 0.044, due to 0.044<0.05, and the mean values of the experimental group and the control group after the experiment are 13.223, and 11.035, respectively. there is a significant difference at the level of relevance, which indicates that in the process of the open education classroom, the addition of VR technology promotes the integration of students to the old and the new knowledge, and helps students to understand the knowledge relevance to themselves, helps students understand the relevance aspect of knowledge and themselves, and can improve students’ understanding of the relevance of the knowledge they have learned to themselves.

The T-test value in the dimension of self-confidence in learning motivation is 3.541, and the corresponding P-value is 0.034. Since 0.034<0.05, there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in the level of self-confidence after the experiment, and the difference in the mean value is 4.009. It indicates that the open education classroom of colleges and universities based on VR technology is conducive to helping the students cultivate their self-confidence in the process of open education classroom.

The t-test value at the level of satisfaction is 2.430, which corresponds to a p-value of 0.028, and since 0.028<0.05, the mean value of the students in the experimental group after the experiment is 14.673. The mean value of the control group after the experiment was 11.832, and there was a significant difference in the level of satisfaction. Therefore, it shows that the open education classroom process based on VR technology is beneficial in helping students develop a sense of satisfaction.

To further explore teachers’ attitudes toward the use of VR open education, this section of the questionnaire survey of 80 teachers in the school shows that teachers’ willingness to try to use VR open education for teaching is relatively flat, with younger teachers’ willingness to use it being stronger than that of older teachers. For this reason, the questionnaire continued to ask teachers what they thought were the advantages and problems of virtual reality educational games, and the statistical results are shown in Figure 4. Among them, the two advantages of “stimulating interest in learning (Question 1)” and “enlivening the classroom atmosphere (Question 2)” were widely recognized by teachers, and 42.5% of teachers affirmed the advantages of open education based on VR technology to “improve learning efficiency (Question 3)”. In terms of the existence of problems, 37.5% of teachers still believe that the technology will lead to students’ game addiction, while 33.75% and 25% of teachers believe that the technology is immature (question 5) and “schools do not support its use (question 6)”, respectively. Surprisingly, with the exception of a small percentage of the two options of “teachers are resistant to using (Question 7)” and “Students are not interested (Question 8)”, the vast majority of teachers have a negative view that open education based on VR technology can “improve test scores (Question 9)”. Among the other options (Question 10), some teachers mentioned that the equipment was too expensive, had side effects on physical and mental health, and affected vision health.

Figure 4.

Statistical chart of teachers’ attitudes towards VR educational games

Immediately following this section, interviews were conducted with teachers in an attempt to understand how they view the prospects for the development of VR open education. The main concerns of the interviews were visualized by visualization with the help of N-gram word frequency analysis function. Among them, the word cloud of teachers’ hot words in the interviews is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5.

The teacher hot word cloud in the interview

Combining their word frequencies as shown in Table 4, it can be seen that learning (weight 1.8422), technology (weight 1.7453), and student (weight 1.6365) are the top three ranked keywords. The top-ranked keywords are dominated by positive feedback terms, for example, interest, prospect, stimulation, novelty, innovation, and efficiency. In contrast, the scattering of negative words is more scattered, which can be summarized as the following words, addicted (obsessed), dull, restrained, deviated, delayed, loss, limitation, sales pitch, and so on. In addition to this, neutral words appear less frequently than positive and negative words, yet neutral words that may imply a richer amount of information also appear in the periphery of the word cloud map, for example, cost (money, exorbitant), difficulty, textbook (teaching material), enduring, popularization, parents, etc.

In this paper, we firstly sorted out the related theories of virtual reality technology, open education and ARCS learning model, and then combined VR technology with ARCS learning model to construct an open education teaching model based on VR technology, and implemented the teaching practice of VR open education model. Finally, the effect of teaching is analyzed using a survey and a comparative experimental method. The conclusion is as follows: 1)

Before and after being taught by the VR open education model, the P value of the independent sample test of the experimental group’s academic performance is 0.001, and there is a significant difference. Therefore, the VR open education mode can improve students’ academic performance.