Exploring Educational Horizons: Immersive Geography Learning

Abstract

The fast advancement of science, research, and technology in our society has had a significant impact on the education sector. It is crucial that education evolves at the same pace as society, providing quality teaching that allows students to develop their talents and prepare for future demands. It is therefore vital to update our education system at all levels.

During and after the 2020-2022 pandemic, new methodologies began to gain space among teachers, who had to innovate traditional teaching-learning to train students in this new stage. For this reason, innovation within the classroom has been embraced, implementing new experiences and resources that motivate students, such as Flipped Classroom, Mobile Learning, Multisensory Rooms, and Immersive Learning. The knowledge society is driven by technology and the creation of various forms of interaction between people, including virtual worlds, which are 3D graphic representations of reality. Immersion in these three-dimensional environments has become an outstanding strategy for teaching-learning, as it allows for close interaction with an artificial world that resembles reality. In this way, learning is built through the experiences of individuals in interaction with the environment and with other users of the virtual world.

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a Systematic Literature Review on the implementation and impact of immersive learning in Higher Education, focusing on the teaching of tourism geography and the areas of opportunity that we can currently take advantage of. A total of 117 articles were selected based on inclusion criteria, events of interest, and keywords, consulting three databases: Redalyc, Scopus, and Scielo, and including studies in Spanish and English conducted between 2015 and 2022. Through a meticulous selection process, results were obtained from 27 selected articles. These articles report experiences about the use of different immersive learning tools, describing an ideal scenario, although without specifying the levels of development reached.