Exploring Hong Kong Youth Culture via a Virtual Reality Tour

Abstract

The advantages of employing virtual reality tours in teaching are attributed to the virtual reality experience it provides to the students. In the case of teaching popular culture, benefits from the potential of VR tour are amplified by the empirical significance that would lead to the students’ imagination and reflection. In addition, an online VR tour suggests a flexibility that allows students to learn anyplace anytime, satisfying the need for blended learning and distance learning, which is a very critical mode of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article discusses the advantages and challenges of blending “virtual reality” into the teaching of popular culture, and, furthermore, the implications of VR in tertiary education are discussed by examining the research that is conducted through the application of a VR tour in the course: Hong Kong Popular Culture. Sixty-eight students participated in the course. After implementing the VR tour, a questionnaire survey and interviews were conducted. In addition, students wrote essays to reflect on the youth culture of contemporary Hong Kong after the explanation of the tour, and these were also examined. We observed the positive responses from the students and the way in which the VR tour could enhance the learning qualities in the course on cultural studies.

You Can Handle, You Can Teach It: Systematic Review on the Use of Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Online Higher Education

“…Significant technological advances are contributing to rethinking and elevating the instructional design so that educational materials that are more specifically applicable are provided to students at their appropriate level of learning. Moreover, the publications reviewed suggest that when using key technologies, learners feel inspired to learn, retain more knowledge, and are more interested in completing the assigned activities [65,66,70,143].…”

“…From a pedagogical and technological perspective, a thread emerges that co-design processes using XR and AI with more conventional resources still benefit learning [70,84]. With the advent of AI, new forms of online learning and teaching support appear to expand student satisfaction, knowledge acquisition, personalized programs [126], and intelligent tutoring-mentoring tools [91].…”

“…Nine papers followed a qualitative research approach using diverse data collection strategies such as surveys [18,65], focus group and interviews [66,67], and case studies [68,69]. Notably, only one paper measured student feedback on a VR tour reflecting on contemporary Hong Kong youth culture using a survey, interviews, and writing essays [70].…”

“…Coded in Social sciences, Ramírez-Montoya and González-Padrón [67] examined student perceptions of social skills integrating emerging technologies such as XR for creating entrepreneurship projects. Within the Humanities, Cheung and Wang [70] connected cultural studies education with VR. Nourishing this idea, the authors implemented a virtual tour to enhance the knowledge of Hong Kong popular culture, showing that VR embedded with real-life experiences provided effective education and engagement.…”

An action research on the establishment of a Community of Practice on technology-enhanced language learning and teaching at tertiary level

“…The outbreak of COVID-19 has accelerated the large-scale implementation of online learning and mobile learning (Tang et al 2021 ), which have been found commonly applied in language teaching and learning (Cheung and Wang 2021 ; Wang 2023 ; Ying et al 2021 ). Various technologies are adopted to enhance online teaching and learning (e.g., ZOOM, Padlet, and Edpuzzle).…”