How immersive virtual reality is efficient to learn management in business schools?
« Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn ». As marketing professor at NEOMA Business School (France) I have experienced how Benjamin Franklin was right!

Since one year, I have used immersive virtual reality to teach merchandising and marketing to hundreds of students thanks to the #ExE Project I have launched (that means Experiential Education), an immersive VR app we have specifically designed at NEOMA BS for our needs (as nothing similar existed).
Education is changing with technologies
This new approach of learning is highly impacting students’ involvement, the daily work of the professor and the deep purpose of a business school. Today, the work of a Professor is to educate students for jobs that don’t already exist, using technologies that have not been yet invented to solve problems that have not been raised. All of this in a global context where:
· Professors in competition with the Internet are not the only repositories of knowledge and information ;
· technologies are advancing far faster in the private sphere;
· new competitors have raised thanks to digital tools and propose thanks to MOOCs the delivery of knowledge.
It sounds crystal clear that it is impossible to teach anymore the same way it has been done for decades! First of all, the needs of firms become far different now due to the technological wave. Secondly, the World Economic Forum expects that critical thinking, creativity, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility are the key individual skills to develop. To enhance these skills, education through experiences is highly recommended.
Virtual reality is a great tool to enhance the learning experience
That’s why I have chosen to use immersive virtual reality to teach merchandising and marketing in a retail context.
The use of such a technology as a pedagogical tool is very useful. For instance, it allows to:
· Make students experiment technology and think on what they could do with later as managers;
· Reinforce the involvement of students by breaking the learning routine. They have fun with learning and more than that they are really active to learn;
· Develop a systemic approach in a non-linear way to analyze the complexity of a shop. It is far more realistic than a traditional business case with dozen pages of linear facts and interviews;
· Avoid group effects as students are fully immersed in the experience of visiting the point of sales and can live individually the experience;
· Make interactive and action based learnings by offering the access to a wide variety of locations and managerial contexts. The feedback on what they lived is faster and more efficient.
We expect three key improvements with this technology concerning learning. First it can be faster as students are more involved: they will learn faster the marketing concepts linked to the business case. Second, it can last longer as students should be positively influenced by this innovative pedagogy, they should remember longer the key learnings. Last but not least, we expect the learning to be more complete as students apprehend the world with its full complexity in a “natural non-linear” way: they enhance their skills on critical thinking and creativity by shorter feedback loops on the experience itself during the class.

Neurosciences have shown that fun, gaming and involvement of students are among the most powerful learning shifts.
This is precisely what allows virtual reality technologies used in a pedagogical way and that’s why based on my own experience I recommend Business Schools invest in this area in a very near future!
