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“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.”  -Benjamin FranklinEngaging learners in your eLearning modules is how you make the content stick.Butwhat is learner engagement?

What is learner engagement? 

Learner engagement poses to be one of the biggest challenges for any course creator. As we live in a world of distractions, immersing and involving the learner needs greater attention than before. Ever been in a class where learners are whispering, exchanging messages, or just taking a quick nap? Well, it simply amplifies that the learners aren’t engaged. Distractions applies to every age group. Learner engagement therefore refers to the learner’s investment in learning in the form of attention, curiosity, interest, participation and interaction during learning.

Why are engagement techniques important?

Learning online can tend to bring in monotony if there is no interaction or engagement. Interactive training sessions make the learning process exciting! As learners are the most important element of the entire training program, it’s even more essential to ensure the learner is engaged right till the end. The intensity of learner engagement determines the retention of knowledge and development of skills. If the learners aren’t engaged, the goal hasn’t been achieved.

Disengaged learners result in –

• Low course completion rates
• Higher dropout rates
• Demotivated learners
• Unskilled learners
• Lower knowledge retention

What does this mean for course creators? Learner engagement is highly essential to ensure goals are reached. Therefore, the focus needs to be on the implementation of the right engagement techniques.

Engagement techniques in eLearning

Interactive Content

Interactivity is one of the key elements that keeps learners engaged. What’s better than getting the learners to participate and interact during learning! The absence of interactive content would mean monotony for the learner leading to disengagement.

So, what does interactive content mean? -The use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)is one technique that is a sure-fire way to keep learners engaged. Content displayed through Flash cards, hotspots, branched scenarios, simulations, immersive quizzes are some of ways to display the content using this technique. When it comes to interactivity, the sky is the limit!

Learner-centered design

Retaining the empathy element in your design is quite essential for learner attention. Analyze the learners, understand their goals and competencies, and design the courses that are aligned to the objectives.

Learners tend to learn when the content supports to achieve their goals. If not, there are chances they may skip the rest. Learner-centered material increases stickiness of the content and decreases the possibility of learners dropping off due to irrelevant content.

Gamification

Who hasn’t grown up playing video games? And most peoples till do. Gamification is highly popular to present content as it elevates learner motivation. Gamification involves the use of game-based concepts such as scoreboard, levels, simulations, etc., in the learning.

Gamification has been proven to improve learner retention and productivity extensively while boosting learner engagement. You just need a great tool to build an amazing, gamified experience.

Immersive Assessments

Consider a scenario where your learners need to answer an assess mentor a quiz. The learner needs to select the right answer and move on repeating the process. The result would be displayed at the end. Once the learner gets the score, it would be tedious to understand where the learner was wrong, or the depth of the learner engagement. To counter this, assessments created in Virtual Reality ensure that learners have higher levels of interaction with feedback that appears after every question. As the process is engaging, learners love the process of interacting with the content.

Tracking and Feedback

Listen to your learners! Offer a channel to provide feedback and share opinions regarding the course. Feedback will help you gain great insight for your courses and eliminate the communication gap. Feedback is another way to elevate what is being created to meet learning objectives.

How to ensure that your learners are on the right track and are making progress? Generating analytics by tracking their assessment results, course completion rates, and accessing feedback will help understand their progress. Furthermore, discussing the same with the learners and providing feedback for them will ensure learner encouragement in learning.

Collaboration

Learner isolation is one of the myths associated with eLearning. Learner-learner, instructor-learner interaction is equally important when it comes to collaborative learning. When learners work in groups to learn or achieve a particular competency, they explore different horizons.

Sharing resources and information, forming a community, and connecting with peers goes a long way in learning.

Trigger learner curiosity

Curiosity is important as it is the key to make learners add to their knowledge by going into the depths of the learner program. It’s essential to provoke learner curiosity in a specific topic to make the entire process easier! Curious learners dig deeper into the topic and explore on their own, which in turn helps in retention, engagement, and generate interest in the topic.

Curiosity encourages and leads learners down different paths and builds a quest for learning and exploring.

We hope these engagement techniques for learning support you to achieve the objectives of your training program. The right authoring tools are essential to have these goals met. Experizer is a no-code tool that includes interactive experiences powered by AR/VR. The 20+ templates include games, quizzes, assessments, digital walkthroughs, and more. The experiences can be published via a link that you can use in your existing program. You can make all these experiences in less than 20 minutes. Sign up for a free trial. Questions? You can reach out to care@experizer.com

Every year, businesses spend millions of dollars on Learning and Development to train employees while being oblivious to measuring training effectiveness. Large budgets mean a Return on Investment (ROI) is expected but the outcome may not be defined.

‘Was the training worth it?’ This is a key question that will often replay in the minds of business owners. Therefore we’d say, there is a strong need to evaluate training and its effectiveness.

No business would increase its spending budget on employee training without reaping any rewards. Evaluating the effectiveness of the training helps you understand how impactful your training has been and how it is contributing to employee growth while ensuring you a safe ROI.

What does training effectiveness mean?

Training effectiveness is useful to determine the overall result of the training on the learner (employee) and how it supports their performance, thinking abilities, and growth. An organization that seeks growth, in the long run, needs to consider training effectiveness to measure the overall contribution of the learner’s impact on the organization’s ROI.

The aim and objectives of the training need to be defined before the training. Doing so offers clarity and direction with insights on what needs to be measured as well as the process to be adopted.

Why is it necessary?

Every professional needs to demonstrate specific skills for their profile. Training effectiveness offers critical parameters that support organizations to identify and evaluate the competencies of individuals. This in turn helps to identify roadblocks particularly while working with a focus on future goals. It also determines the ROI using which you can gauge whether further training would be supportive or needs to be modified.

An effective training model thus supports improving performance, raises employee satisfaction (boosts their morale), increases productivity, and installs new sets of skills in people while identifying gaps. This also means the top management can choose to focus on tasks of higher priority with their subordinates working well without supervision.

What are the training evaluation parameters?

As we have gauged the effectiveness and importance of training, the next step is to understand the meaning of parameters to measure the level of effectiveness. You can consider training evaluation parameters as the metrics used to understand the impact of the training on the specific learner. These parameters can be specific to the purpose and are entirely quantifiable. These can include course completion rates, percentage of employees to the ROI, and more.

Parameters need to be defined in advance otherwise the objective of measuring them would simply not work!

How to measure them?

Measuring training effectiveness requires you to consider the following points for the process.

• Identify and define KPIs
  KPI refers to the Key Performance Indicator. This allows you to specify a quantifiable performance expected from the learner. Any organization can make informed decisions with insights from KPIs. You can consider them to be the key target areas required to track any learner’s progress. For example, an eLearning product may target “X number of signups per month.”

Begin with defining the Key Performance Indicators and their values against which you would be measuring the achieved values. KPIs can also include factors such as profits, conversion rates, and so on.

• Learner feedback
  Evaluating training effectiveness also includes getting feedback. This step is useful to know areas of improvement and understand the experience of the training process. Effective training considers the learners’ experience and modifies the process where suitable.

• Interactivity and Engagement
  The use of interactivity and engagement is essential to keep learners involved and engaged. Monitor the completion rate and know if learners are leaving any courses unfinished. It also helps to analyze how many have completed the course and their level of understanding of what is being discussed.
• Assess them!
  Assessments support any instructor to understand the following things about a learner –
  1.  Has the learner genuinely understood what has been conveyed?
  2.  Is there any need to modify the content or the process?
  3.  How much of the information has been retained?

You can conduct assessments through different formats that include gamification of content to bring in a fun element.

Selecting the right parameters
What happens when you’re traveling to a place without a destination in mind? You would probably be roaming in circles!

Choosing the right parameters is essential to work according to the objectives and expected accomplishments of the training. The application of the right parameters defines and gives insights into the success of your training along with areas of improvement. Irrelevant parameters will impact the training effect that will take you further away from the objective.

Importance of evaluating training
Measuring training effectiveness gives you the power to evaluate what you are doing and what steps you need to take for the future.

Its importance is relevant in terms of the gaps to be addressed to ensure learners stay engaged and apply the teachings.

Knowing the KPIs, staying organized, and taking relevant action on the results of the training are important for any organization.

However, measuring training effectiveness may not always be easy considering the time and cost taken to develop technologies to streamline the process. One solution includes using technology that empowers you to make informed choices.

Technology that powers up your training programs while saving time + cost is a boon! Meet Experizer, a no-coding AR/VR authoring tool that offers trackable experiences you can create in minutes. You don’t need to invest in teams to build software, nor spend time figuring out how to track your learner’s progress. Being xAPI/TinCan, compliant learners are tracked using LMS as well as inbuilt systems.

All you need to do is choose a template and begin the creation. With Experizer, you can engage, immerse, and involve learners in the learning content. The use of AR/VR ensures stickiness of the content that learners will simply fall in love with!

Thinking about measuring training effectiveness? Sign up for a free trial to leverage your content to a whole new dimension.

Online learning has been prevalent for many years; however, its use has been largely augmented only in recent times. This is particularly due to the complex situations that arose with the pandemic in 2020. Educators and trainers have had to put their thinking caps on to find the best practices for imparting education online. Interactivity in eLearning has been actively used, but are the practices moving ahead with the recent times? Or is it time to move towards Hybrid Interactivity? Let’s find out!

A couple of years ago, listening to lectures in the classroom was a common sight. In today’s times, this passive form of learning is considered less-stimulating as compared to interactive online educational programs.

Research reveals students lose interest, remain disengaged, and tend to forget information quickly in the traditional classroom format. These learning methods are also not capable of tracking results to measure a student’s performance with greater accuracy.

However, in recent times, this conventional environment has already made way for online education wherein the real-world atmosphere is created in the best possible ways. Welcome to Hybrid Interactivity.

What is Hybrid Interactivity? How can it change the game?

If interactivity is engaging, what could be the problem-area?

Interactivity in learning offers students the chance to interact online at different points in the eLearning program. This promotes the learners’ thinking skills while increasing curiosity levels to seek more from the subject. Interactive learning brings the focus on the learner while educating self from the comfort of one’s home. However, educators have also observed fading attention spans on behalf of the learner during online learning programs. This brings us back to the question, “How engaging is your interactivity in online learning?”

Here’s our set of observations for traditional learning formats:  

Challenges Faced by Learners

• Reduced attention-span
• Monotonous learning format leading to boredom
• Lack of self-motivation

Challenges Faced by Educators

• Lack of innovative methods to impart learning/training
• Lack of technical expertise
• Lack of time for complex course creation

While interactivity in eLearning is already in use, the monotony of course presentation may lead to greater distraction for learners bringing in a new set of problems for educators. A move towards Hybrid Interactivity based on immersive learning, however, indicates a change in the game!

 What is Immersive Learning?

1) The user who engages with the program is placed in an interactive learning environment that is created through replication of a real-life scenario. It could be a 360 degree view or talking a user through a digital walkthrough on an ancient place.

2) The learning happens through a process of bite-sized modules. The learner can listen, understand, and absorb the information.

3) The stickiness of the content increases the levels of interaction of the learner! A student has a higher chance of engagement and will ‘stick around’ the program for a longer period.

 Why choose Immersive Learning?

1) Virtual Reality in Learning has displayed effective results of an 80% retention rate even after one year of completion of the training program. Traditional learning formats however displayed a 20 percent drop within a week of the program.

2) A student who uses the VR learning format feels highly involved and therefore immersive learning gets 100% attention.

3) Gamified immersive learning has an even higher chance of stickiness as compared to other formats owing to its engagement rate.

4) Tracking your student’s progress turns out to be easy! Sophisticated SaaS products that use evolved learning standards such as the xAPI and infrastructure like the LMS, LRS, and the LCMS offer this feature as a part of the program.

For example, It could be a Trivia around a history lesson that is presented in a 3D format or a 360-degree view that offers an immersive experience of the solar system. The combination of real-life simulations, videos, and image format when coupled with cleverly-placed action items for a learner, takes the experience to a completely new level altogether.   

What is hybrid Interactivity?

Consider all the above elements that can be created within minutes without coding experience. Most importantly, it runs on all platforms including smartphones, desktops/laptops, mobile-enabled VR glasses, and standalone VR glasses. That’s Hybrid Interactivity for you! It’s easy to create the experience all within a couple of clicks.

Click to view the video below to get the Immersive Experience with Experizer.

“Is there a catch? Does it take a long time to create Hybrid Interactivity online?” We know you’d have questions in all of these areas. Educators and trainers can rest assured this Hybrid Interactivity can be created with No Coding! Yes, no coding at all with no requirement of complex technical knowledge.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Sign up for a Free Trial with Experizer (no credit card details required)
• Choose from the wide range of templates available (Walk-throughs, trivia, theatre experience, virtual tours, and more)
• Customize the images, videos, and content as per the theme
• Click to Publish
• Share a link with your learners or add the link to your eLearning course

What is Experizer?

Experizer heralds the beginning of the implementation of Hybrid Interactivity in online education. Experizer with its no-coding, immersive AR/VR experiences is a game-changer in a constantly evolving digital world that requires innovation coupled with speed. This cloud-based solution gives educators and trainers complete freedom to create Hybrid Interactivities within minutes. Oh, yes, did we mention that VR glasses are optional but we’d recommend them for a greater immersive experience. Our experiences have been used by prominent firms (airlines) to share information for their employee onboarding program or to bring together the best of the Universities online for a Virtual Career Counseling Camp.   Click here to view the entire sample list.

Hybrid Interactivity is about breathing in fresh life to your eLearning programs and promises to change the entire dynamics of online learning. If you’d like to enjoy the immersive experiences, sign up for a Free Trial.

After making Virtual Reality publishing easier for course authors and engaging for learners, Experizer has now launched a new version that allows non-coders to build highly engaging Augmented Reality templates without any coding knowledge. The no-code environment by Experizer offers the ability to build a truly universal learning content that can be viewed on Laptops, Desktops, VR Glasses and even Mobile phones without any specific hardware and can be made trackable using the much popular ‘Experience API’. 

Experizer is now powered by 20 templates that can be used to build Learning Experiences by just adding content. The best part is that Experizer has come out with a new plan that is free and can be used for almost unlimited amount of time. Even advanced learning analytics is an important part of this release where detail activity of a learner can be tracked by the author. 

The value add of Mixed Reality(XR) in learning content cannot be overlooked. To increase the stickiness of courses, XR is the perfect tool that has helped learners get concept clarity – immersively. When you get to move a paper printed Cube like object infront of the camera and check out a 3D model of a Skeleton or even an Engineering object, it makes a significant difference in retention of knowledge.  

In an official announcement, the Chief Innovator of Experizer,  Vishal Adsool said, “We have always respected and worked very closely with Instructional Designers for chiseling out the feature list for the new release. Most of them have told us that in these unprecedented times, the need for building Immersive Experiences using AR/VR far outstrips the capacity of developers to create them. Now with Experizer, almost anyone can create powerful immersive experiences that are insertable in almost any authoring tool and trackable on almost all LMS’s.” 

The company believes that the tool could be used directly by course authors as well as Instructional Designers to build a no-code configurable Learning Experience. Authors can also build and contribute ideas towards building new templates. 

You can sign up for your free account on Experizer at https://studio.experizer.com today to know more. 

The recent technological advancements have made it possible to integrate virtually simulated environments to make learning more effective. It has been proven that any learner is able to retain 80% of the subject taught when he/she is actively involved or engaged. Well, these Virtually simulated environments are now coined as “Immersive Learning Experiences” and it is now possible to experience the enormity of the universe and cellular complexity of living organisms by not leaving the classroom using this tech.

Imagine the power of your students sitting in a classroom being able to take a virtual tour of the Great barrier reef on their laptops or desktops. Or even better learn about the history behind the ancient archaeological sites, by virtually visiting the sites from the library. Imagine being present at Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” or accompanying Neil Armstrong on the first moon walk — it would be a lot more memorable than reading about it, right?

What the Research stats say about Immersive Learning Experiences?

Researchers at the  Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology (PEB)are currently developing Virtual Plant Cell, the first interactive VR experience that is designed for use in the classroom. Learners explore the alien landscape of a plant cell. Wading through swampy cytosol, ducking and weaving around cytoskeletal fibers, and uncovering the secrets of the plant’s subcellular treasures: emerald green chloroplasts, where photosynthesis takes place, curious blobs of mitochondria, or a glimpse of DNA through a psychedelic nuclear pore.

The inner workings of the cell are grounded, allowing students to actively engage with the lesson’s content through meaningful tasks. They may work in pairs to give each other tours or create a photosynthetic production line. Using intuitive gestures, students grab carbon dioxide and water molecules from around the cell, feeding them to chloroplasts to produce glucose and oxygen. With all the ingredients for active learning, the Virtual Plant Cell should be a particularly effective teaching aid. Indeed, preliminary data suggests it may  improve learning over traditional methods by 30%.

Immersive learning can do what traditional learning cannot. It not only shows a student what something is but also makes the student learn about how it happens. Human psychology differentiates between theoretical(what) and practical knowledge(how). In simple words, the best way to learn a skill is by implementing it in real life.

Experience creates Experts

Students can explore different careers first-hand by visiting the workplaces. For instance, a student who aspires to become surgeon can experience the interiors of an ICU and the equipments of a surgeon. The student can learn the complexity of a surgery by actually experiencing it without leaving the school lab.

The mind-blowing feature of immersive learning is that it makes learning fun and not dull, which helps a teacher have a better command over the students. The students interact with their peers which in turn helps them develop team building skills. Instructors nowadays don’t even need to write a single line of code to create immersive experiences for their students.

The objective of immersive learning is to create an experience, which triggers understanding and awareness among students. Immersive learning enables hands-on learning for students which makes the student actively participate in discussions and taking reflective actions in a safe and controlled environment.

The theory of constructivist-based learning, according to South African educator Dr. Seymour Papert, “is grounded in the idea that students learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information ‘poured’ into their heads.”

For example, in traditional learning, knowledge and meaning are transferred to students by their teachers. However, when a student is immersed in an interactive VR module we often hear, “NOW I understand what you are saying about chloroplast!” This is where constructivism plays a vital role as knowledge and meaning is coming from the student’s experience. So, in simple words, VR based immersive learning develops constructive learning for better understanding of the subject

Research suggests that immersive learning strengthens the connection between a student and a concept, therefore possibly heightening retention.

When students are in an immersive environment, they are far less prone to distractions such as classmates, phones, and so on. They are left to concentrate on that core concept.

It is about participating in the learning process and having actual/virtual experiences, and enjoying the process, which in turn should increases engagement and motivation within students.

How can Immersive Learning help teachers?

VR based immersive learning empowers teachers to make flexible additions to the curriculum and make necessary changes to their methodology of teaching. Possibility of attending to different styles of teaching is now a reality for teachers. This in-turn increases the pace of rapport building process with the students in a classroom. Teachers can now track a student’s understanding of the topics being taught using analytics which is not possible in traditional learning process. Constant assessment of VR analytics data allows a teacher to efficiently analyze, track and monitor the progress of a student, and also provide guidance and feedback to the students.

As interactive VR based learning encourages active participation, it becomes easy for teachers to identify possible gaps in understanding and attend to those issues in a timely manner, only if they are afforded that kind of data.

There is a frequent misconception that immersive learning in the VR will make the teacher’s job redundant. Far from it! One of the key components of immersive learning is that it allows the instructor to act as facilitator, freeing up time to work with struggling students, one-on-one. Allow students to connect with these difficult situations or concepts on their own, constructing their own pathways to understanding.

Experizer is a Web Based Authoring Tool that empowers you to build 360° Immersive Experiences quickly and easily. These 360° Immersive Experiences can be used for classroom Trainings, Virtual Tours, and even simple Assessments. With our “No programming anytime” approach you can simply select a pre-existing experience template, upload your content and publish it for Web, Mobile as well as VR glasses. And thanks to the Cloud, every 360° Immersive Experience that you create on Experizer is seamlessly available to all students within your classroom as well as all online audiences. 

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The Millennials are here. And the world is taking notice.  

Millennials today make up the largest demographic group in the U.S. Comprising of 80 million people. Their expected spending is estimated to stand at $600 billion. Accenture predicts that this amount will rise to $1.4 trillion annually or 30% of total retail sales by 2020! The sheer size of this population makes them one of the most powerful influencers of the retail economy. Driven by experiences above everything else, marketing to the millennial customer has to all about creating memorable experiences…experiences that integrate seamlessly into their environment that they can positively associate with.  

Having been born in the midst of the digital revolution, this generation is well conversant with technology. They are uniquely capable of integrating technology seamlessly into their lives and are comfortable viewing the world from their digital lens. Virtual Reality, or VR as it is more popularly knows, thus fits in comfortably in their narrative and is giving marketers new opportunities to evaluate the ways they connect with this demographic. 

The meteoric rise of VR 

VR has grown phenomenally over the past couple of years from a tool for entertainment and gaming to a revolutionary tool to connect with the users on a deeper level. Millennials, for example, not only look at VR for an elevated gaming experience but also as a necessary tool at work. A study conducted by Penn Schoen Berland shows that 58% of millennials preferred high-tech in-office perks like VR as opposed to the traditional ping pong tables or free snacks. 66% of millennials believe VR aids better training.  

Owing to the numerous opportunities of applying VR to drive experiences, it is hardly a wonder that the VR market is growing at an exceptional pace. According to a Zion Market Research forecast, the global VR market that was valued at “$2.02 billion in 2016 is expected to reach 26.89 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of around 54.01% between 2017 and 2022”.   

VR and the Millennial Customer – A Match Made in Heaven  

Today’s marketers have had to sit up and take notice of this shiny and attractive new technology. Caught in the midst of an ever-evolving digital landscape, marketers have to look at creating experiences that attract the consumer and keeps them engaged with the brand. Being the technology savants they are, millennials are drawn to the highly immersive and intimate experiences curated by VR. Millennials are also on the constant lookout for authentic experiences and VR presents itself as the frontier to give them exactly that.  

The quality of VR experiences are also becoming very high and are surpassing expectations of technology-oriented experiences. Marketers can now amplify brand experiences using VR. Honda, for example, released a 360-degree VR content that allowed the viewers not only view the new Honda Civic from inside but even allowed them to test drive it by playing a racing game. Ikea employed VR to build their interactive kitchen experience which allowed their customers to remodel their kitchens virtually.  

VR also gives marketers the opportunity to enable ‘self-insertion’ into media. Though this is not a new trend as there have been many fiction authors who take the first-person account, for marketers VR gives them the opportunity to enable this for their consumers when experiencing their products. The growing sophistication of VR experiences is making sure that these experiences take the consumer from being a passive viewer to an active participant.  

With VR, marketers can provide their consumers with access to things that they don’t usually have or help them experience something differently. Extreme sports, for example, is not something one can experience easily. But using VR, you can curate such an experience for the consumer. Adidas’s Climb a Mountain campaign is an excellent example of using VR for brand activation for Adidas TERREX products.  

Why is VR Becoming a Dominant Reality Today? 

VR is becoming an active contributor to marketing success as marketers are realizing its power to create deep, meaningful and engaging experiences. VR marketing also has received the nod of Social Influencers with 95% of social influencers being aware of this technology. This is important as millennials are heavily influenced by these influencers who comprise of bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers etc. with 42% of millennials following influencers on social platforms. Social Influencers are today touted to be more influential marketers than even Hollywood celebrities! Clearly, attracting them for brand activation becomes essential for success. 

The prohibitive cost of VR hardware was impeding towards VR adoption. However,  with the price of VR headsets coming down, consumer interest in the same has increased. Smartphones too are coming armed with VR capabilities, making VR more ready for marketing. 

The high cost of development for VR experiences was also preventing marketers from adopting it in their brand activation strategies. Along with being effort intensive and expensive, developing the right experiences was also time-consuming.  

Today, however,  the technology has matured and as its target audience has warmed up to it. It has also become much easier to create immersive virtual reality experiences without any programming. Marketers now have the capability to transform their content into immersive virtual experiences by using customizable, pre-defined templates and publish it for Web, Mobile as well as dedicated VR Glasses.  

While VR was a futuristic dream a few years ago, today it is a reality. The future is here.  

If you want to know how to create immersive VR experiences in a snap, try Experizer for FREE – https://www.experizer.com 

With the eLearning market expected to be worth over $200 billion by 2024, modern technology like virtual reality (VR) is all set to completely transform the eLearning landscape – not just across corporates for skill enhancement but also as a robust learning tool across educational institutes. Through the use of realistic images, audios, and various other formats, VR provides an exceptional learning impact – and takes learning outside the boundaries of the traditional classroom.

Since learners can interact with an environment that replicates the real world, it ensures an extremely engaging learning experience. Today, VR holds unlimited opportunities for training: from basic manual process techniques all the way through to high-level executive leadership development in the workplace to continuous and uninterrupted learning in the academic sphere.

Here is how VR can enhance your eLearning:

1. Immersive: VR is used to deliver truly immersive virtual training experiences. Through the use of VR headsets and glasses, you can create an entirely real-world interactive world, attract learners to enroll for courses time and again and enable them to enjoy a higher interaction level. By providing an environment that authentically reflects the real-world environment, VR helps to provide some context and situate theoretical knowledge. Learners can be transported into a world where they can apply theoretical knowledge and hone their critical thinking skills.

2. Safe: Through VR, learners can not only learn aspects of their day-to-day tasks but also learn how to apply skills in real-life. This is especially true for employees working at risky, dangerous and accident-prone work sites. Through VR, you can train your employees on how to handle difficult tasks without the risk or the cost implications of placing them in a dangerous site or a remote destination, while simultaneously avoiding injuries and mitigating risks. In the mining industry, for instance, employees can be taken on a virtual tour of the mines. Since it’s dangerous to send employees to real-life mines unless they’ve been trained in them, VR makes it easy to train them on the hazards they will encounter down under – without actually putting them there. In another example, the Winterthur Gas & Diesel company uses virtual reality for training of the engine room crews at the Marine Power Academy Training Centre of Hudong Heavy Machinery Co. in China.

3. Realistic: The most common training need triggering the use of VR is to expose learners to a large range of realistic experiences. As classroom or eLearning provides learners very little freedom to practice the application of skills they’ve learned, VR allows them to practice what they’ve been taught with increased efficiency. For example, VR can be very effectively used to train employees on large-scale machinery such as a large extraction equipment or drilling machines without encountering any practical challenges.

4. Engaging: VR allows you to provide training content in a highly engaging manner. By simulating real-life scenarios directly onto standalone headsets, you can provide a 360-degree view of best practice techniques of across a range of topics – from hazardous onsite locations to flight simulators, medical practices to engineering processes – and instantly transport learners from the training room directly into an engaging experience. Whether you have a group of medical students learning the criticalities of a surgery, a team of engineers learning the nuances of a new product line, middle managers working on managing a retail warehouse or C-level executives taking an advanced management program, VR makes it easy to create any scene and truly engage learners within the training session. Students and employees can learn to deal with difficult situations with striking realism, and take role play and situational practice to a whole new level.

5. Convenient and cost-effective: In contrast to other training methods that involve the use of highly innovative training materials and learning resources – that are either limited or expensive to purchase in huge amounts – by modeling the real-world environment into a virtual world, VR is extremely convenient and cost-effective. Learners no longer have to travel to attend training courses and can help in saving training time and budget. Walmart employees, for instance, make use of VR to understand the frenzy that black Friday is. By virtually standing in the middle of all the madness, employees can prepare themselves for the swelling crowds and panic-driven shopping. Employees can also learn about customer service and understand the operational aspects of the store like how items should be stacked and arranged.

Enhance learning outcomes With the VR training market predicted to grow to $6.3 billion in 2022, the sensory-driven interactive environment that it offers is unmatched. By replicating experiential learning activities in the classroom environment, it delivers a good degree of reality – which cannot be achieved through text, audios, or videos. VR in eLearning provides the opportunity to quickly and easily build and distribute relevant, captivating scenarios that add a deeper level of understanding to drive self-directed learning in students and enhance the skills of employees, without significant time or financial investment.

In a fast-changing world, updating learning content to keep up with the times has become extremely critical. Since corporate training drives corporate advantage, if you don’t stay on top of the latest in the learning landscape, you stand the risk of a misinformed workforce, problems around compliance and issues scaling knowledge — which can ultimately damage your company and its reputation. On the other hand, impactful and engaging training can bring in massive enhancement in the workforce productivity. Given the fact that a majority of today’s workforce is made up of millennials, expectations from training have changed – today’s learning solutions need to be on-demand, accessible across devices and platforms, and highly immersive in addition to offering collaborative learning, and personalized experience.

Virtual Reality or VR is picking up immense steam in the corporate training space; reports suggest that by 2023, the AR ands VR market is set to reach $9.9 billion. By bringing real-life simulation into the classroom environment, VR is making training extremely immersive, engaging and interactive. Realistic simulations can help employees participate in role plays, understand the nuances of a particular job and make risk-free decisions. From placing employees in hard-to-reach and unfamiliar places to enabling interactive office tours, learning the nuances of operational tasks to providing safety drills, enabling risky situational demos to transparent risk assessments – the use cases of VR in corporate training are plenty, that can enable employees to carry out real-life tasks and receive real feedback.

Here are 5 reasons why VR is right for your corporate training: 1. Onboarding: VR also finds great application in the employee onboarding process. Since onboarding is the first experience of office life, with VR, you can provide new employees with an introduction to the company, take them on an office tour of the premises, enable them to view multiple business locations, meet their remote managers in real time, and much more – all this from their onboarding location or even from the comforts of their home, before they’ve even stepped foot in office. A company with a robust and effective onboarding process is more likely to have higher employee retention levels and productivity while making the process more efficient and enjoyable and reducing costs with a standardized process across locations.

2. Experiential learning: With experiential learning being one of the most effective ways to learn, VR aids in developing a range of business skills through practice. By providing a safe space to learn by experience, employees can develop skills across myriad jobs – from public speaking to sales, negotiation to networking – aspects that are rarely taught to employees. Since it is these simple enterprise skills are what managers look for in employees and that keep businesses running, VR enables you to bridge the skills gap and inculcate enterprise skills within your employees. With VR, employees can practice what they’ve learned in the courses through realistic simulations such as networking events, job interviews, and speaking in meetings and at conferences and receive instant feedback. For example, to hone public speaking skills, employees can record their speeches, and receive instant feedback on their communication skills, eye contact, use of filler words, pitch, pace, and more. Using this as a benchmark, they can further hone their skills and improve their scores.

3. Safety training: VR be used to develop on-the-job skills but also increase knowledge of occupational safety and avoid on-the-job accidents. Earlier, employees in risky manufacturing setting, mines and nuclear reactors would have to imagine a high-risk scenario and visualize how they would cope with it. However, VR removes the need to imagine a difficult situation and instead replaces it with realistic simulation. By placing employees in the high-risk situation, it enables an effective learning experience by training them in the most realistic way possible, without the situation actually happening in real life. For instance, oil companies can train employees on emergency exit procedures at their oil refineries. Employees can learn aspects of safety training in a risk-free virtual environment, make more informed decisions at a quicker rate and reduce the chances of mistakes in the real world – mistakes which could even be fatal.

4. Compliance training: VR can also be efficiently used for compliance training; by providing an immersive, repeatable experience, you can not only demonstrate compliance requirements but also reinforce the implications of non-compliance. Using role plays, employees can participate in compliance dilemmas and see how they would react, how well they understand the repercussions of their actions and the effects of non-compliance; you can then challenge workers on their knowledge, view their progress and identify strengths and areas for improvement. For example, for diversity and inclusion training, you can replicate real-life scenarios to minimize unconscious bias and enhance communication between employees when confronted with discrimination.

5. Leadership and Crisis Management: Gone are the days when managers could be trained on how to tackle crisis situations through a series of classroom sessions. Companies today can use the power of VR to create (almost) real-world situations and scenarios and teach the managers and business leaders about handling difficult situations and manage stress levels during the simulated crisis situations. This helps companies to truly prepare their top brasses for worst case situations.

Enhance employee skills

Most employees don’t look forward to corporate training – sitting in a boring classroom, staring at a huge desk of slides is not anyone’s cup of tea. With VR, you can bid adieu to boring and mundane training courses and a big hello to immersive simulations. The employees can safely make mistakes and learn from them and master critical skills with minimal risk to your business and operations. Whether you’re looking to train a new staff member, demonstrate a new product or looking to change a process across your organization – VR provides a realistic and safe training environment for better engagement and memory retention.