As part of the curriculum at the Department of Tourism, Brawijaya University, Malang City, Indonesia, the authors are conducting a virtual tourism course to understand the interrelation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the tourism and hospitality fields. Moreover, this course also included practicums to create and use varied, immersive systems such as Web-VR, 3D VR, Multiplayer 3D VR, Marker-Based AR, and Marker-Less AR content in the context of tourism business etiquette and procedures as a virtual tour guide. In continuation, under the coordination of the tourism laboratory, they initiated a virtual living lab together with students and stakeholders that focus on strengthening Malang's City identity as a heritage city by using AR/VR technologies. Therefore, this chapter aims to define and recognise basic insights of the concept, types, and characteristics of remote practicum methods. Specifically, this review also describes with examples required equipment and best practice software and explains the advantages and limitations that may occur.
TopIntroduction
Covid-19 outbreak prevalence has devastated higher education institutions to temporarily suspend conventional in-class lectures and practice-based courses, thus transforming them into online platforms. This most significant and unprecedented disruption of education systems in human history indeed brought numerous challenges (United Nations, 2021). The required sweeping changes in curricula, pedagogy, and the learning space have occurred in this ongoing global uncertainty. Yet new forms of face-to-face learning and practice emerged in this long hiatus. As the virtual world, known as “metaverse,” began to be introduced into present life rapidly, a low-cost and convenient virtual equipment, user-friendly metaverse software, is becoming more and more commonly used in education (Kye et al., 2021). Metaverse is a collaborative virtual reality environment facilitated by a persistent computer network where multiple users appear to be present and explore graphical representations, gain immersive experiences with objects, and interact socially in real-time for work, leisure, or education purposes (Bafadhal, 2020).
Based on the wisdom of Confucius, who said, “Not hearing is not as good as hearing, hearing is not as good as seeing, seeing is not as good as knowing, knowing is not as good as acting; true learning continues until it is put into action,” that makes the practical part of education must be a priority. The successful adjustment of virtual tools into the tourism curriculum, practicum, and fieldwork project provides better learning of the application of virtual technologies. Students need to be aware of not merely the aspects of knowledge enrichment along with improving digital skills; they also need to use them to get better prepared for their future careers.
The pandemic continues to strike hard on Indonesian tourism, leading to leisure and hospitality workers suffering through inevitable layoffs. Unfortunately, most tourism labor in Indonesia has an inadequately educated and well-trained workforce, and rarely have they graduated from suitable higher education institutions. In turn, this has consequences for tourism post-pandemic recovery. Even more, in this challenging time, the lack of practical application of theory and technologies such as in internship courses (Park & Jones, 2021), field trips (Benckendorff et al., 2019), and practicum (Lieberman et al., 2022) will cause the students not obtain an active learning environment and stagnancy of students' technological literacy which lead to decreased self-efficacy, reduced competitive advantage of graduates in the labor market and tended to prepare-less for this ever-changing industry.
Hence, to cope with such needs for practical and off-site field learning, an interactive virtual learning platform is necessary for transforming the crisis of teaching-learning into an innovative opportunity for tourism education. Increasing ubiquitous technologies allow our bodies to keep at home but cultivate cognitive, technical, and social skills just at the click of the mouse or swipe of the screen, thus making learning contiguous, continuous, and omnipresent at the same time. The value of education cannot be merely measured through the teaching-learning material inside the walls, but anything spread out to bring life to learning by stimulating students to develop lifelong learners anywhere. Hence, practicum learning that was initially in the laboratory can be applied at home (Kirkman et al., 2002) or even everywhere. Bafadhal & Hendrawan (2021a) reviewed the existing and potential exploitation of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in Serious Game that offers an interactive, entertaining, educational and alternative way to learn different aspects of a destination, thus can be presented as an essential learning space complement or temporary substitution through “learn from home.” Moreover, when “learning from home” is becoming unavoidable in a world of uncertainty and fast-changing socio-political circumstances, more of such virtual and online platforms are regarded as sustainable to be applied across disciplines, courses, and over a long period of teaching time (Hales & Jennings, 2017).