Harnessing immersive learning: Upskilling tractor owners to grow their businesses through virtual reality
The following is a guest post written by Natalie Miller from XRGlobal, which builds virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality solutions that revolutionize learning and development in emerging markets.
Kimau is a tractor owner who thinks the real work starts when the harvest season begins. But waiting until the last minute to look for farmers who needed tractors cost him customers and money.
With a virtual reality (VR) headset on, you see him; you’re standing beside him in front of his tractor, and you can feel his pain and regret. It’s immersive, it’s engaging, and it’s portrayed through storytelling. VR learning has been documented by us and many others — including Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and PwC to name a few — as a vastly more effective methodology than instructor-led presentation-based training.
This immersive training, created by XRG, is being used to onboard new tractor owners and booking agents of Kenya-headquartered agritech Hello Tractor (more on our program with Mastercard Strive). Dubbed the ‘Uber for the farm,’ Hello Tractor supports tractor owners in leasing their tractors to smallholder farmers.
Kimau’s story showcases the power of VR: by featuring real tractor owners (one who started early in recruiting potential small farmer customers who need tractors and one who didn’t) trainees can empathize with, relate to, and connect with the lessons of the story. As was detailed in Strive’s blog about XRG, and virtual reality training more broadly, immersive learning evokes greater emotional connection and behavior change than traditional training methods.
The power of storytelling for immersive learning
“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo-sapiens — second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”
— Reynolds Price, American novelist and teacher
It can be argued that storytelling is part of the fabric and culture of nowhere more than in Africa, where it has been practiced for thousands of years as a way of passing down traditions, history, values, and learnings. It’s a technique designed to create interest, showcase theory in practice, and help learners better understand complex ideas. As described by Wharton Interactive, “Telling students a story places ideas in a broader context, providing a richer understanding and creating a durable memory — we remember in context, and we forget isolated facts.”
Forgetting facts is exactly the problem we created XRG to solve, among other training pain points, such as taking trainees out of their work and family life for long periods. According to the forgetting curve, learners will forget an average of 90% of what they have learned within a week after training. When you factor in the time, money, and effort that goes into training by development aid agencies and companies alike, it’s a massive waste of resources and an immense hurdle for true upskilling and learning.
In the past four years, our offline/online extended reality platform has successfully trained nearly 100,000 people across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Notably, we have seen up to a 45% increase in retention from learners compared to classroom learning. Simultaneously, there has also been an average 60% reduction in training time, showcasing the efficiency of our approach.
Designing VR training for Hello Tractor that brings learnings to life
Hello Tractor tasked us with designing VR training to address challenges they observed with tractor owners and booking agents. Tractor owners, reliant on financing their farm equipment, face repayment difficulties without sufficient revenue, which they can earn from leasing their equipment to farmers during harvest times. For these tractor owners, our VR training aims to illustrate the advantages of collaborating with booking agents, while for booking agents, our aim is to emphasize the importance of early engagement with acquiring and onboarding small farmer customers through the app. Via Hello Tractor’s booking agents, collaboration and early engagement mean tractor owners with equipment to lease can find farmers who need it.
With the rollout of this training, we anticipate increased collaboration between booking agents and tractor owners, with a focus on greater app activity post-training. Monitoring these outcomes will gauge the success of this training initiative.
Learning from design
Reflecting on over four years of revolutionizing client training, we’ve gained valuable insights and lessons from crafting immersive VR learning experiences, including:
- Tailoring training design to the trainee’s level is crucial for ease of use and overall effectiveness.
While clients may be excited about complex interactions in virtual reality, considering the literacy and digital literacy levels of end users is crucial. For example, we worked with a large international NGO client with trainees who were mostly women with education levels of grade 4 and below, many lacking even feature phones. Initially, the client desired interactive learning with path choices and multiple-choice questions in the headset. Upon deployment, it became apparent that the design was too advanced.
A redesign was necessary to simplify the learning journey. In response, the modified training involved groups putting on headsets, experiencing immersive learning scenes, removing headsets to discuss the learning story, engaging in Q&A, and then putting the headsets back on for additional scenes. This approach ensured a more effective and inclusive learning experience. The trainees were overwhelmingly positive about the experience, with one trainee explaining, “We now see what we have been told to learn.”
- Co-creation and alignment are necessary to design successfully.
XRGlobal has always placed a strong emphasis on the collaborative process of co-creation with our clients. Right from the outset, when developing storyboards, our clients actively participate as subject matter experts, contributing their expertise, while we bring our proficiency in transforming content into VR curriculum.
Our process involves continuous input and client feedback, considering cultural and geographic norms and realities. This collaborative approach ensures that the resulting VR training is not only educational but also culturally relevant, making it a realistic and impactful learning journey for the trainees involved.
- A complete replacement of traditional learning is not always necessary.
Not every learning scenario requires a complete shift from traditional methods; a hybrid approach often proves effective, enhancing the overall learning experience. Organizations with extensive training content can incorporate VR selectively, offering a big-picture perspective and breaking the monotony of traditional methods.
Our journey at XRGlobal has been one of continuous innovation, learning, and a commitment to transforming training experiences. As we navigate the evolving landscape of virtual reality, storytelling, and co-creation, our focus remains on creating impactful, inclusive, and culturally resonant learning journeys for individuals around the globe. Stay tuned as we share more insights and lessons from our work.
