iVisit: Using 360-degree interactive digital sites to practice problem-solving and collaboration within complex spatiotemporal contexts

Problem-solving and collaboration are increasing necessities for the 21st century construction workforce. The new frontier of human-technology requires professionals to work on complex problems, each bringing his or her own expertise to find an appropriate solution. Often, the physical and social context associated with the problem determines participant cognitive reasoning processes and peer interactions for a successful resolution. Construction disciplines use problem-solving and collaborative learning approaches to increase student conceptual learning, knowledge retention, and critical thinking. Nevertheless, hands-on interaction with construction contextual information is often impossible to obtain in a classroom setting, requiring students to visit locations that are inaccessible, dangerous, or expensive to reach. Consequently, students with reduced exposure to construction spatiotemporal contexts lack skills for integrative decision-making, communication, discussion engagement in real-world work-based situations. Additionally, limited financial resources, time constraints, and standardized educational curricula introduce other challenges for educational institutions and teachers to integrate these activities in their programs. The challenges present on traditional classroom instruction further broaden when using online delivery methods. Students who are geographically dispersed pose further barriers for supporting equitable problem-solving and collaborative learning due to the difficulties or impossibility to reach the required locations. These problems in construction education translate into the industry as students are assimilated in the workforce with a deficient understanding of problem-solving and collaboration at professional work environments. To address this lack of construction learning opportunities within real-world contexts, this research explored the use iVisit – 360-degree panoramic environments supported by virtual humans for realistic site visits. iVisit enables students to practice problem-solving and collaboration within construction spatiotemporal contexts, offering the basic skills required to approach these situations upon entering the industry. Specifically, iVisit aims to supplement current site visit interventions when these are available within the construction curriculum or to offer an alternative when these contextual interventions are not available to students. In this research, the exploration of iVisit was performed using two district approaches – iVisit Problem-Solving and iVisit Collaborate. For iVisit Problem-Solving, a comparative analysis between-subject experimental evaluation was performed by contrasting a traditional paper intervention and a digital iVisit intervention. Student performance was evaluated to investigate the use of such virtual environments for practicing situated problem-solving. The findings for iVisit Problem-Solving indicate that the effects of iVisit virtual environments varied depending on the methodological requirements of the problem-solving activities. iVisit Problem-Solving was found to significantly increase the student development of problem-solving skills during empirical related activities such as observation of site material properties and their relationships. However, no significant differences were detected between paper and iVisit interventions to enhance the student understanding of abstract theoretical knowledge. For iVisit Collaborate, a phenomenological study was performed to understand how student dyad behaviors affected the collaborative problem-solving process within iVisit virtual environments. The findings in iVisit Collaborate suggest that student collaborative behaviors did not directly generate successful problem-solving. A hierarchical relationship between student problem-solving and collaborative behaviors was observed, indicating that problem-solving behaviors must take place to enable the occurrence of collaborative behaviors. Student discussion engagement supported the exploration of the problem space, enabling the construction and maintenance of shared mental models. Moreover, It was observed that instructor scaffolding helped to reduce the degrees of freedom in the complex problem-solving activities and to promote student discussion engagement.