The Immersive Classroom – The Future of Learning
As we flip the page on another year, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment in time for immersive technology. We have spent most of the 2010’s developing our understanding of the potential roles that VR may play in our future while becoming more accepting of its flaws,and simultaneously dreaming of the day when AR is available to the masses. As a result, we enter the 2020’s eagerly anticipating the golden age of truly mature and impactful content that will do more than just stimulate our imaginations, but help us explore the depths of our own potential as humans.
While the anticipated growth of applications for gaming, healthcare, and retail are undeniable, it is the utilization of XR to re-imagine the way we learn that will be most compelling in the new decade. How we understand and comprehend new information, how we experience what has not been experienced before, and how we change as a result will redefine our personal aspirations and shape decisions that will impact the two things we spend most of our lives doing – performing in the classroom and at work. In the coming decade, XR will allow for new means of cultivating knowledge and preserving intelligence, leading to the rise of a new and more powerful workforce, one that is more prepared and capable than any in our history.
The classroom of tomorrow will finally cease to have physical boundaries, as schools will slowly adapt to the boundless opportunity for cognitive development and retention to be realized from any location through XR. Didactic curricula and lesson planning will be marginalized in favor of true immersive firsthand experience, one that focuses on preparing students to solve fundamental issues that may have a greater impact on humanity largest threats. Students will develop human centered learning approaches, making frequent experimentation and iteration commonplace like many of today’s most successful innovation firms. They will be challenged to apply their experiences in XR to real world scenarios unfolding in real time. In the immersive classroom, there will be no boundaries to what can be discovered.
Similarly, the workplace of tomorrow will become more and more dependent on the need for physical and virtual convergence and less devoted to upskilling your individual performance to meet company objectives. XR will create an abundance of empathetic workers, whose experiences will drive consistency in innovation through a clear problem-solving methodology. By virtually walking in someone else’s shoes, we will not only experience pain points firsthand, we can implement proactive mechanisms and test them without consequence, in order to ultimately prevent them entirely. Through XR, industry will become more self-reliant in establishing a consistent environment for high productivity and problem solving, eliminating barriers that may negatively impact customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.
We must realize we are at the tipping point of the next technological revolution. Everything in our daily lives has the potential to be disrupted, however it is the impact that immersive technologies will have on the ways we learn which will ultimately change us forever.
The time is fast approaching. Are you ready?
