For VR to Reach its Potential, We Need to Escape Outdated Models of Learning
Last year, I had a professor of mine state that “a lot of education technology just ends up being old wine in new bottles”.
The more I’ve been able to develop workplace learning in the VR space, the more I’ve come to realize how true that statement is. Even in my own articles 3 years ago, I found myself examining VR through outdated models of education. There’s a good reason for this: it’s hard to imagine something radically different from a system we spend 12–18 years in.
Today, the dominant model of VR in education is a sort of ultra video, a way to pour information into a learner more efficiently. But this model of purely information based learning has already failed - many MOOC organizations are now retooling their offerings based on this understanding. Despite the experiences of the last decade, we continue to think that by simply increasing immersion, we will achieve better learning outcomes.
What’s actually necessary is a radical revision of how we facilitate learning - in school, the workplace, and everywhere else. Yes, VR can potentially play an exciting role in this revision. But VR is only one of the tools we can use to demolish and rebuild our methodologies of learning.
As an example, in a recent project, my team constructed a VR simulation to develop collaborative skills (abilities like these are crucial for the jobs and challenges of the future). What some might have imagined is having the viewer watch a situation unfold, and a narrator give tips for better collaboration — similar to the current model of video education. We chose instead to create a problem to solve. We gave the users no instructions and no advice, except to work together to solve what they saw before them. One user was in VR, one user remained in physical reality. Each saw the problem from a different perspective, and had to find a way to bridge that gap. After the users had figured it out, we sat with them and talked over what they had seen. The self reflection we witnessed was powerful. People who had long worked together were moved to profound realizations: they did not interact with people the way they thought they did.
VR has the potential to create this kind of experiential, transformative learning. It will involve getting more creative than porting previous forms of media and lecture into a headset. It will involve moving between reality and virtuality, creating new metrics of assessment, and giving learners the space to form personally meaningful conclusions.
Like old wine in a new bottle, bad education will never improve just because it’s in a new medium. However, if we can get to the essence of what we want, and have the grit to try radical new approaches, perhaps we can make learning experiences that transcend even our most exciting technology.
