ASSESSING THE PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN EDUCATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY USING SOCIAL MEDIA DATA

Abstract

Education is undergoing significant reform to address emerging challenges and meet the evolving needs of modern students and society. In this context, technology-enhanced learning has gained popularity as a means to enrich education. Extended reality technologies, including mixed reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality, are being recognized as invaluable tools that offer immersive learning environments. These environments foster interactive learning experiences, promoting students' motivation and engagement. Virtual reality, in particular, allows users to actively interact with virtual objects and experience immersive environments in real time. Its alignment with constructivist pedagogies facilitates collaboration, communication, engagement, and interaction.

Adopting and integrating virtual reality in education brings numerous benefits. However, to comprehend the public's perspectives and viewpoints on this novel technology's adoption in educational settings, it is essential to consider crowd wisdom. Aggregating information and collective knowledge from public groups can lead to more efficient outcomes than relying solely on expert opinions. Social media, influenced by hybrid media logic, has become an integral part of modern life. It enables collaboration, communication, content sharing, and knowledge creation, making it a vital tool for information discovery, dissemination, and opinion sharing. Therefore, social media serves as a means for conducting data mining based on publicly available content to extract the wisdom of the crowd on specific matters.

This paper presents the justification, aims, and research questions that led to this study. It outlines the methodology and data analysis process, showcasing and analyzing the results. The main findings and conclusions are summarized and discussed, along with the challenges and limitations. Furthermore, directions for future research are provided, aiming to advance the understanding of virtual reality's integration in education and the role of social media in extracting crowd wisdom