Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review studies on the use of virtual reality (VR) and gamification to engage students in higher education for marketing issues to identify the research topics, the research gaps and to prepare a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach A literature review is performed based on two search terms applied to Web of Science, resulting in a final pool of 115 articles. A text-mining approach is used to conduct a full-text analysis of papers related to VR and gamification in higher education. The authors also compare the salient characteristics presented in the articles. Findings From this analysis, five major research topics are found and analysed, namely, teaching methodologies and education, experience and motivation, student engagement, applied theories in VR and gamification. Based on this and following the theory concept characteristics methodology framework, the paper provides directions for future research. Originality/value There is no comprehensive review exploring the topics, theories, constructs and methods used in prior studies concerning VR and gamification applied to higher education services based on all the articles published in well-regarded academic journals. This review seeks to provide deeper insights, to help scholars contribute to the development of this research field.
Highlights
Technology is in continuous development, gaining increased relevance in several areas
In higher education environments, these cases are even more pronounced as organisations are dealing with stakeholders with specific characteristics, such as students
Virtual reality (VR) is a computer-generated simulation of a situation that allows individuals to be immersed and abstracted from the real environment when interacting with the virtual environment in a manner that appears to be real (Flavian et al, 2019a; Loureiro et al, 2019c; Loureiro et al, 2020)
Summary
Technology is in continuous development, gaining increased relevance in several areas. These results show both topics as being very recent in the literature, with little research devoted to them, highlighting the need for further studies and the relevance of this paper Moving forward with this analysis, we underline another relevant issue, which is associated with the journals where the articles of our final pool were published. These results show a significant difference from the pool of articles resulting from query 1, as these results are already more devoted to the scientific areas focussed on in this study.
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