Harnessing the power of Virtual Reality with Gen Z
Gen Z, born generally from 1995–2014 is now officially in college. How might virtual reality adapt to this generation of true digital natives?
GEN Z
There’s much to be said about Gen Z, a generation born between 1995- 2014. This generation is steadily entering into the higher education system and into the 21st century workforce.
As true digital natives, they have only experienced life with internet and technology — and they continue to interface with new technologies daily.
Gen Z’ers are practical, values driven, social media savvy, highly creative, and highly collaborative. In education, they want on-demand learning experiences, they prefer digital course material, and they want to be empowered in their own learning.
In an article by Forbes Magazine, tech entrepreneur Sieva Kozinsky states
“Gen Z students tend to thrive when they are given the opportunity to have a fully immersive educational experience and they even enjoy the challenges of being a part of it. For instance, 51% of surveyed students said they learn best by doing while only 12% said they learn through listening.”
Antiquated tools will not captivate this new generation of learners. How then is education and workforce readiness training adapting to this new generation of learners?
VR & EDUCATION
At Wonda VR, we believe immersive learning should be a reality for everyone. VR can empower learners to both learn faster and more effectively, specifically in the field of soft-skills development.
According to Dale’s Cone of Experience, students can retain up to 80% of what they have learned through simulation which can exponentially drive the development of high order thinking and analytical skills, critical to the 21st century workforce.
VR experiences, inherently simulative, when paired with a curriculum is a powerful blended-learning approach.
In the last two years, we have witnessed its use case first hand in developing communication and interpersonal skills — whether immersed in the center of a gentrified Parisian neighbourhood (such as in La Republique, an experience designed with Harvard VR pioneer, Senior Preceptor in Romance Languages and Literature, Nicole Mills) or leading an important multicultural team meeting (such as in award winning First Impressions, an experience designed for the Global Training Initiative at North Carolina State University).
These immersive experiences are just the tip of the iceberg and its potential remains largely untapped.
With high quality VR headsets such as the Oculus Go are now becoming affordable for every learners to use, the only problem that remains is the availability and access a new generation of highly immersive learning experiences.
While Educators’ interest level in VR is substantial — more than 8 out of 10 teachers think VR will help improve learning outcomes according to a 2016 Study — adoption rates remain challenged by complex technical barriers that make learning content creation and distribution complex and costly.
Even when using 360° videos and 3D object-scanning tools, content creation and distribution often requires hard-to-use game engine software, which is excessively complicated when the goal is to add simple VR video annotations and quizzes.
Furthermore, there is no open marketplace for immersive learning content and sharing, so publishers and content developers in the educational space are forced to create costly standalone VR apps without the necessary financial means and skills to monetize and distribute them at scale.
If Gen Z is a generation of on-demand content consumers who learn best through immersive experiences, VR can be a pivotal, game changing tool for learners of all ages — The time for VR in education is now.
INTRODUCING WONDA VR SPACES
With this vision, we’re excited to introduce Wonda VR Spaces, a next generation social learning platform that gives anyone the opportunity to create, share and discover immersive learning experiences anytime, anywhere across any device. Wonda VR Spaces aims to cultivate creativity and collaboration, serve as a portal to curate meaningful content, and create community in real time.
Cultivating Creativity and Collaboration
Wonda VR Spaces offers an intuitive editing tool that gives learners an opportunity to create their own immersive experiences. As a cloud-based collaboration platform, students can co-create content with peers adding a range of media (2d, 360 and 3D), audio, annotations and even polls/quizzes. The entire creation process of a VR learning experience can be completed in a matter of hours and without any coding knowledge.
Curating Content
As 360 content expands and a library of resources are developed, our LearnSpaces provide a social platform for learners to aggregate and curate meaningful content. Instructors can have their own Learnspace courseware library. Students can have their own Learnspace that corresponds to various subject matters. Anyone can have their own Learnspace tagged to themes of interest. Learnspace offers real time collaboration with peers as well as the ability to create dynamic presentations. When the project is complete, it can be shared on any web pages, or using the Wonda VR App and be seen with or without a VR headset (Cardboard, Gear VR, Oculus, HTC, Microsoft Mixed Reality).
Creating Community
Live Session is live multi-user VR session where students can connect in real time through an avatar, offering a new way for learners and professors to virtually congregate. Similar to a videoconference call, it’s a new learning environment that offers learning communities to come together over shared goals with immersive presentations. These sessions are built natively for VR and AR headsets and allow every participant to be together into a shared 3D Environment.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
This article has been written by Arnaud Dressen (CEO and Founder of Wonda VR) and Grace Lau (Head of Partnerships at Wonda VR).
You can learn more about their work at Wonda VR by visiting: https://wondavr.com
