Visiting central heating plant and mechanical rooms in buildings: A case study of virtual tours to foster students’ learning in a distance course

Abstract

Technical visits of installations related to course content can support learning, engagement and motivation of engineering students. However, the COVID-19 lockdown has prevented many in-person activities on campuses. In this work, we propose a framework for developing virtual tours, which we applied to replace in-person visits of heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) rooms of buildings located on the campus in an HVAC undergraduate course. The virtual tours rely on many pictures taken in the mechanical rooms, as well as on technical drawings and information integrated in the visits. Students were provided in advance with a series of questions which they had to answer by navigating through the virtual tours. A survey allowed to assess what students appreciated and the difficulties that they encountered during the virtual visits. We found that the virtual visits had several advantages compared to in-person visits, such as allowing students to take the tour at their own pace and extending the learning experience to include other features (e.g. reading technical drawings). Different examples and suggestions of improvement are presented in the paper. The tours had a positive impact on students’ learning and engagement, with overall positive feedbacks from the students. The main hurdle encountered by students was the difficulty to locate themselves in the rooms, which we addressed by adding room layouts in the visits.