Preparing industry-ready engineers with virtual reality: recent research and future directions

Focusing on Virtual Reality (VR) in undergraduate engineering education, this article examines research published in 2014-2020, critically reviews the state of VR research, and highlights its applications and educational benefits. More importantly, this article presents a new, comprehensive framework, namely VR for industry-ready engineers, and discusses future directions for research on and practice of VR in engineering education. The multi-phased conceptual work started with a series of search and selections of related research from the web of science and IEEE databases. 19 publications met all of the selection criteria and were fully analysed. Multiple analyses were conducted, including bibliometrics, categorical meta-trends analysis and inductive content analysis, to discover the general trends and various characteristics of recent research. The new framework highlights four essential types of learning opportunities to prepare industry-ready engineers, it also summarises the proven and promising VR applications to realise such opportunities. This article further proposes future directions for VR in engineering education, calls for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, suggests emerging research methods, and encourages longitudinal and large-scaled studies. Additionally, the article calls for critical awareness of present and potential issues and concerns in VR adoption in education.