Pilot Study of Using ARCS Model to Investigate Motivational Affordances of EduVenture VR from Perspective of Construction Management Students

Spherical Video-based Immersive Virtual Reality (SV-IVR) is regarded as an affordable and creator-friendly VR-based technology to be adopted by educational practitioners. Nevertheless, from the instructional point of view, a major limitation of SV-IVR is its incapability to offer interactivities between students and SV-IVR content, leading to the demotion of students’ motivation in the course of learning. EduVenture VR (EVVR), which is an integrated interactive learning system riding on SV-IVR to support students in conducting interactive and immersive virtual expeditions, has been developed to address this instructional gap. In this pilot research, on a qualitative basis, we adopted the instructional motivation model of ARCS (composed of 4 dimensions: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) to investigate the motivational affordances of EVVR from the perspective of higher-education students from a program of Bachelor Applied Science in Construction Management in Australia. It involved retrospective semi-structured interviews with 4 construction management students who had experienced EVVR-supported learning activities in their coursework. Results show that, in general, the participants positively perceived EVVR’s motivational affordances in all 4 ARCS dimensions. This pilot work lays an empirical foundation for further research into the motivational affordances of EVVR in supporting instructional activities in construction management through a larger-scale study.