Virtual reality (VR) is making exciting headways into the educational system, giving teachers new and effective tools to impact the minds and lives of their students. The combination of low-cost, smartphone-powered headsets and inexpensively produced 360 VR content enables teachers to experiment with virtual reality applications. In fact, as of June 2016, Google claims that over one million students have experienced virtual field trips through its Expeditions program.
Early VR applications, although groundbreaking in many ways, are only scratching the surface of the technology’s potential to transform learning. Below are three highlights from my recent presentation at the 2016 SIIA Education Industry Symposium.
#1 Virtual reality promotes retention through exploratory learning
Traditional models of education are centered on the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student. Success is primarily determined by a student’s ability to retain information and demonstrate comprehension on assessment measures. It is widely acknowledged that this model needs to be turned on its head in order to prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s jobs.
Plato and Maria Montessori advocated that the concept of mind, body and spirit are interconnected and that hands-on experience, learning and personal development are interconnected as well. Constructivists seek ways of helping students become better processors of information and develop skills that are applicable to real-world issues. Virtual reality enables this type of learning in ways previously inaccessible to educators.
Imagine a teacher teaching about the International Space Station from within the spacecraft, as they can do with Unimersiv’s App. Or consider a VR lesson where students get to learn about marine biology by actually exploring the deep ocean. Virtual reality removes the constraint of what’s physically possible so that students can experience anything imaginable. One of my favorite applications of this new realm of technology is the Curiscope human body application, which enables students to explore their own anatomy.
Now imagine those classrooms with VR and consider how the teacher’s role has changed. Educators will finally have the ability to move away from being mere purveyors of information to becoming guides for their students’ educational journey. They can now lead them through the fascinating deep exploration of many virtual places and provide interaction with and dissection of virtual objects.
#2 Virtual reality helps equalize access to education
Despite efforts by the No Child Left Behind Act to improve education in lower socioeconomic regions, inequality across the public school remains intact. According to The Hechinger Report, the gap between wealthy and poor schools actually increased 44% over the last decade. STEM courses, which best prepare students for future jobs, often experience the largest shortage of materials and quality teachers.
Once purchased, virtual reality devices can help address the shortage of materials that exists in classrooms. Virtual content can supplement or even supplant real materials for chemistry experiments, biology dissections, home economics, music, and art classes. In addition, virtual reality enables the expansion of those materials to include items that weren’t previously safe or practical. Virtual chemistry labs could incorporate combustive materials and biology classes would even be able to dissect large animals.
Virtual reality also helps with the shortage of quality teachers by enabling student-teacher connections across the globe. Online courses have been slow to adopt this technology because the camaraderie among students and teachers in a physical classroom is an important driver of student engagement. As VR technology evolves, students and teachers could interact in virtual environments with the same level of intimacy as in the real world. The LectureVR app is already making distance irrelevant through its suite of virtual meeting places and lecture halls.
#3 Virtual reality supports cogitative and emotional development
Perhaps the most profound way that virtual reality will change education is by supporting the development of high-level cognitive functions within the learning process, such as patience and empathy. Unique to other forms of technology, virtual reality is consumed in a fully immersive context. This means that users are completely present in the experience without the distractions that exist in today’s educational environment. Users are also fully engrossed in the content first-hand, enabling them to not just comprehend the material but actually feel its essence.
In his recent TED talk, Chris Milk shared that 360 VR videos are being used to fundraise and spread awareness for the Syrian refugee crisis. By creating VR stories of refugees, Chris argues that virtual reality allows us to “empathize and feel humanity in a profoundly deep way.” In another example, consider how powerful it could be to learn about U.S. history by actually experiencing discrimination, and imagine the life-long impact that the experience could have on students.
Although virtual reality is still in its infancy, there are many indicators to suggest it is even now breaking into our schools. Samsung conducted a survey that found 85% of teachers are enthusiastic about using virtual reality in the classroom. The most cited use cases were virtual field trips and STEM simulations. In addition, Goldman Sachs predicts that the market for VR educational content will reach $300M in the next four years.
Given the proliferation of VR hardware and content, the desire of educators to adopt the technology, along with strong market projections, it’s probable that the next generation of students will be learning through a pair of goggles.