Empowering Experts in Crafting Virtual Reality Training Instructions for Manufacturing Education

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments are shown beneficial for skill training and learning in manufacturing education because of their ability to provide in-situ spatial and embodied interactions for enabling hands-on experience for learners. Despite the benefits, the utilization of the technology by educators is severely restricted due to barriers related to cost constraints, hardware complexity, crafting suitable content, collaboration, technology acceptance, and development of learning outcomes. This thesis addresses these barriers by focusing on empowering educators to craft instructional content in three key areas: (1) Curriculum Design and Development, which involves structuring content that effectively integrates VR while aligning with educational objectives; (2) Authoring of Instructional Content, which enables educators to create immersive VR experiences without requiring programming expertise; and (3) Planning Instructions for Desired Outcomes, which supports reusing and sequencing VR content to meet learning goals. The research spans a scoping review and the development of design frameworks and system workflows using welding as the primary use case. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are validated using collaboration with experts from industry training and learning sciences, as well as experiments involving human subjects from relevant disciplines. We envision that the research supports educators in the manufacturing sector to embrace immersive VR technologies and create relevant content that meets the workforce demands of manufacturing industry.