A Review of VR in Undergraduate Construction Education and Training: Unveiling the Opportunities to Address Content Areas from ACCE’s Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research documents the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for construction engineering and management (CEM) education; it does not explicitly consider how VR supports undergraduate CEM program accreditation. Through literature review, this paper elucidates how VR supports accreditation by documenting how VR is used to address the content areas associated with the American Council for Construction Education’s 2013 Student Learning Outcomes (ACCE’s SLOs), used for accreditation from 2014 through August 2023. The authors reviewed 59 articles and found that VR has been used to address the content areas associated with ACCE SLOs 1–3, 5–11, 13, 15–16, 18–20 (note that SLOs 7, 9, and 13 have since been deleted). This study documents that VR activities provide benefits including virtual on-site immersion, manipulation of time, and cost efficiency. Results also indicate that VR does not yet address content areas associated with ACCE SLOs involving human interaction, quantitative calculations, construction management tools, delivery method, nor stakeholder and risk management. This paper contributes to the construction education body of knowledge by documenting (1) those content areas associated with ACCE SLOs where VR training has been implemented, (2) the benefits of VR applications in undergraduate CEM classrooms, and (3) unexplored content areas associated with ACCE SLOs.