Increasing learners' sense of presence is important in professional training, in particular, when aiming to foster their competences of making judgements and solving problems when facing real cases. However, in conventional training programmes, sometimes it is difficult to situate learners in real cases owing to several considerations, such as cost and potential danger. Scholars have indicated that the lack of opportunities to experience real contexts could seriously affect the training outcomes. To cope with this problem, the present study proposes a spherical video‐based virtual reality (SVVR)‐based professional training (SVVR‐PT) approach based on the attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction (ARCS) model to situate learners in an authentic training environment to experience the process of solving practical cases before facing real cases. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, a true experiment was conducted in a hospital by randomly assigning 70 nurses to an experimental group learning with the SVVR‐PT approach and a control group learning with the conventional training approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperformed the conventional approach in terms of promoting the learners' sense of presence and learning achievement as well as their problem‐solving tendency and critical‐thinking awareness. Moreover, the SVVR‐PT learners also showed higher technology acceptance than the conventional training group. What is already known about this topic? Spherical video‐based virtual reality (SVVR) immerses learners in an authentic environment that enables them to have more opportunities to experiment and practice. Attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction model has great potential in promoting learners' motivation and engagement. What this paper adds? A motivational model‐based virtual reality approach is proposed to facilitate learners' professional training performance. In addition to promoting learners' training performance, the results claimed that the proposed approach could promote students' sense of presence, problem‐solving tendency and critical‐thinking awareness. Implications for practice and/or policy It is potentially worth using the motivational model‐based virtual reality approach in professional training to facilitate learners' performances and perceptions. The proposed approach can further analyze and compare the effects of the cooperative learning strategy on learners' performance and recorded learning process.

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