Study on the impact of using virtual reality in developing students’ soft skills

The integration of Virtual Reality (VR) into higher education has gained significant attention for its ability to provide immersive and experiential learning opportunities. This pilot study examines the impact of using VR on Year-2 students' engagement, learning, and professional skills development within the Ethical and Professional Issues module in a UK University, with a specific focus on employability skills. The research utilizes BodySwap, a VR simulation tool designed to enhance students' soft skills, particularly job interview skills. Through interactive and immersive experiences, students engaged in simulated interviews, receiving real-time feedback on their articulation, body language, eye contact, and use of filler words. To evaluate the effectiveness of VR-based interview training, feedback collected from students is used for sentiment analysis. The study examines deep learning models for sentiment analysis techniques for classification. BERT and and DistilBERT are applied to detailed feedback from participants. Each approach is used to classify feedback into either positive or negative categories, with the most effective method determined based on accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score. DistilBERT model slightly outperform the BERT model with higher speed and lower resources.