Learning in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment can be a captivating and immersive experience for students. Despite the potential that VR has to help students learn in new and exciting ways, many students may also struggle during their initial interactions with a given VR environment. Whether or not effective user onboarding takes place can be the make or break of an application’s success.
A new publication sheds light on this key challenge of effective onboarding by exploring how pre-training methods impact the onboarding experience in VR educational applications. 36 people, primarily university students, participated in a study to understand how different approaches affected their ability to navigate VR environments and their overall satisfaction.
The findings show that pre-training helps users get an orientation and slightly boosts satisfaction, but it falls short in building confidence—an essential factor for immersive learning. Interestingly, participants strongly favored interactive tutorials over static slides, which suggests a demand for more engaging onboarding methods.
This research underscores the need for dynamic, user-centered onboarding strategies that go beyond basic instruction. As VR becomes more common in classrooms, developing onboarding experiences that are not only informative, but also interactive and confidence-building will be essential to unlocking its full educational potential.
For more detailed information see:
Sabah, S., Tillman, A., Schneider, J. and Drachsler, H. (2025). Enhancing User Onboarding in Virtual Reality Educational Applications: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Pre-Training User Onboarding Method. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education – Volume 1: CSEDU; ISBN 978-989-758-746-7; ISSN 2184-5026, SciTePress, pages 364-371. DOI: 10.5220/0013278100003932