Virtual reality is encroaching on physical reality, finding its way into university classrooms as its development continues and it becomes more affordable.
Proponents of VR cite faster learning, better ability to retain information, and fewer distractions while learning. It’s also just really cool.
Business school Insead, which has a campus in Abu Dhabi, has developed programmes that take learners to Mars, remote villages, and factories around the world just by slipping on a headset and a pair of headphones.
The Mars mission, with its CGI-generated videos of the red planet, lets individuals step off earth and into orbit. The 3D, 360 degree experience definitely captures an audience’s attention – even if it is because the screen goggles are right in front of you. It’s a bit ironic that within the virtual reality, you are most free from virtual distractions that plague reality. With a screen just centimetres from your eyes, there is no room to check a notification on your phone or browse the internet on a laptop.
Ithai Stern, Insead professor of strategy and academic director of VR Immersive Learning Initiative, told ITP.net that the university is continuing to develop educational VR content, setting up a digital library.
“It will be a platform when other schools join in and start to produce their own content,” Stern said, adding that the model is still being debated. The library might follow a pay-per-use system, or it could also be a subscription-based service.
Right now, outside use in business schools, Stern said he’s seen VR applied in social work programs and security and law enforcement training programs where individuals often have to navigate complex situations in their profession.
“Engineering programs have used it, as well as social work programmes, because they can drop students into the middle of complex and uncertain social settings,” he said.
Stern, who has been working with VR for three years, said he expects the technology to percolate through education, eventually being more commonplace in secondary and primary schools.
“I think that we’re going to see more adapted more and more, starting now at some universities,” he said.
The headsets right now cost 300 euro ($326), but like with most technologies, the cost is falling. However, the calculated cost of getting VR into classrooms is more complex. Beyond the headset, there is a cost for software, and a cost to develop the software. Those costs can range anywhere between thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands to produce a case. But when those development costs are spread out over years of use, the cost per case goes down.
Referring to a case like the Mars mission that required heavy CGI work, Stern said: “If I divide the CGI work over 20 cases, it’s much cheaper. So there’s definitely economies of scale here.”
Even with the tech becoming more affordable, it will be awhile – if ever – until it’s ubiquitous in classrooms, and there are some kinks that still need to be worked out. For one, there’s no ability to take notes when you’re wearing a VR headset.
Most of the time, people don’t use the headsets for longer than 20 minutes, and often it’s no more than a few minutes at a time, but people do like to write things down.
“To be honest, from the start, we didn’t realise how some people really need to feel that they need to take notes,” Stern said. However, because most of the VR content is experiential, there isn’t a real need for notetaking within it, he said.
But the team is still exploring ways to maybe embed notetaking capability within the technology. While the technology has matured enough to be put to use, it’s still growing, and what’s next for the tech remains unknown.
“The problem is, we are in in this in an industry that hasn’t really been disrupted for over 2000 years,” he said.
For Stern, VR may be the game changer in education, but “it’s still a maturing industry and technology,” he said.
