Why is Immersive Learning a Strong Tool for Upskilling Employees?
Active learning leads to enhanced performance and knowledge retention. And one of the learning methods that can achieve this is immersive learning. This novel approach incorporates a variety of engaging activities within the instructional teaching style. Therefore, it transforms the very idea of education, knowledge delivery, and retention. Moreover, at a time when U.S. companies annually spend a whopping $100 billion on corporate training expenditure, immersive training can help carve a highly-skilled talent pool. As more companies dive into the digitized future, let’s take a closer look at immersive learning and how it can revolutionize workforce education.
What is Immersive Learning?
Immersive learning is a learning paradigm that uses technology to design virtual environments and immerse learners in a multidimensional training space. Moreover, it is a highly effective multi-sensory approach to educating individuals with varied learning styles. Immersive technology adds the following elements to the learning methodology:
- It creates an interactive simulated learning environment
- Learners become active participants in their development process
- They can directly assess their own performance in the environment
- It reduces the development time of new skills
How are VR and AR Impacting Immersive Learning?
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)-enabled immersive learning incorporates visual, kinesthetic, and aural or auditory learning into the traditional disciplines. Adding new elements piques learners’ interests and allows them to look at the same subject through multiple lenses. The major points of impact of VR and AR are the following:
1. Maximizing Engagement
New ways of interacting with a lesson help increase professional engagement with the subject. Therefore, this enables learners to take home experiential knowledge as opposed to one-dimensional theoretical knowledge of classical training models.
2. Increasing Inclusivity among Learners
Immersive technology shapes workforce relationships and activities through strategic collaborative exercises. As a result, over time, there is a synergy among all kinds of learners—auditory, visual, kinesthetic, among others—enhancing workforce collaboration and creativity through experimentation.
3. Memorizing Information Easier
Since immersive learning involves the ‘learning by doing’ methodology, it fosters a culture of active learning that maximizes professional development. Moreover, information retention is said to have a far-reaching effect with the use of AR and VR, as experiential understanding cements theoretical knowledge.
4. Learners’ Control over the Curriculum
Industries possess diverse talent pools with different needs. Immersive learning enables professionals to choose specific elements of a lesson or a technical concept they might need assistance with. VR-enabled tech spaces allow selective participation in the gamified environment, thereby engaging a variety of learners with unique abilities.
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Is Immersive Learning Effective for Adults?
A 2022 Forbes article states that learning through experiences increases retention by 75%. Moreover, when employee engagement is one of the biggest workplace challenges, immersive learning offers distraction-free learning with employee-specific customizations.
According to adult learning theory, most adults prefer engaging with training models with clear expectations and goals. Another essential postulate of the theory is that adults prefer to learn instead of being taught. They look for a space to direct their learning and apply it in real life.
Immersive technology combines these two elements to create a goal-based educational experience where the learner has a greater percentage of control. Furthermore, in this golden age of immersive technology, the plethora of choices is enormous—VR, AR, 3D movies, interactive video games, and mixed reality, among others—when building highly competent workforces.
Finally, a theoretical understanding of real-life work scenarios has its limitations. Story-driven learning approaches ensure a meaningful addition to a professional’s skill sets through repeated, simulated practices.
Why Immersive Learning is the Future
The pandemic has accelerated a major shift toward tech-enabled learning. A Bloomberg report has mapped all the pointers to show that the future of learning is immersive. From employee training to school education, its radical potential has been deeply felt across the globe. This aligns with a 2022 Precedence Research report stating that the immersive learning market will hit $134 billion from $21.6 billion between 2021 and 2030.
How Adult Learners Can Leverage Immersive Learning Experiences
Adult learners, professionals, and managers can harness immersive learning and knowledge in the following ways:
1. Problem-Centered Learning
Simulating problematic real-life scenarios can provide employees with hands-on experience in implementing their knowledge. This reinforces the behavior, leading to faster learning and quickly converting skills into habits.
2. Tracking Learning Behavior
Managers deploy many tools and unique data points to extract the most out of this tech-driven learning environment. This information is vital to understanding each immersive program’s effectiveness and generating a narrative of employee behavior. Additionally, incorporating feedback within the learning module can be spontaneous if anything or anyone falls short.
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3. Increasing Risk Tolerance
When professionals are able to make risky choices with zero consequences, their real-life performance improves. Inviting employees into risk-based simulations of handling consumer data or preventing a cybersecurity attack, for example, will boost their confidence and preparedness for potentially dangerous situations.
4. Personality Development
In order to forge an employee-centric work culture, it is crucial to thoroughly understand what motivates people. Immersive learning focuses on employees’ competitiveness, enthusiasm, and socialization skills to accurately showcase their areas of expertise and improvement.
5. A Safe Space for Experimentation
VR and AR’s gamification module introduces the idea of betterment without the anxiety of failure. This enables employees to experiment with multiple processes, and by the end of the lesson, they feel empowered to participate intuitively in real-life scenarios.
As the world becomes more technologically driven, applications of immersive technology will only make their way across all industrial sectors. An intelligent mix of these emerging technologies with appropriate teaching methods can create a formidable futuristic workforce. Enroll for Emeritus’
machine learning courses and artificial intelligence courses to better understand the concept of immersive learning and related technologies.
By Bishwadeep Mitra
Write to us at content@emeritus.org
