Multimodal teaching in digital media arts education: insights and challenges from teachers’ perspectives

Multimodal teaching, which integrates diverse sensory channels (e.g. visual, auditory, tactile) and media forms (e.g. text, images, video), has emerged as a transformative approach in digital media arts education. This pedagogical shift seeks to elevate creativity, technical proficiency, and critical engagement. Meanwhile, Virtual reality (VR) has been used in multimodal research due to its enhanced capability to integrate multimodal modes and efficiently present multimodal interactive content. However, limited research exists on the current state of the digital media arts field and the specific practices of professional teachers in leveraging multimodal content through VR. This study employs the qualitative method, conducting semi-structured interviews with seven digital media arts teachers, combined with analysis of syllabi and teaching materials, to explored their pedagogical practices and conceptualizations. Findings reveal six implementation themes including perceptual experience design, meaning construction, interaction design, cognitive depth, knowledge presentation, and collaborative learning, alongside four conceptualization themes such as goal orientation, project-based learning, multidimensional evaluation, and flexible adaptation. Theoretically, this study enriches multimodal frameworks via sensory orchestration; practically, it guides curriculum design in digital media arts education.