“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” These words from Benjamin Franklin highlight the importance of involvement and immersion in productive learning. Immersive learning is a hot topic among professionals in learning and development, education, and various industries. It promises to transform traditional learning methods using technologies like interactive games and immersive virtual reality (VR).
But how can you ensure your immersive learning strategy really works? Creating an effective immersive learning solution goes beyond just having the right tools – it requires creativity and strategic planning tailored to your organization's needs.
In this discussion, we'll look at five key strategies to help you make the most of immersive learning so you can create engaging, effective, and impactful training experiences.
1. Clearly Define Your Objective:
Before diving into the creation process, take the time to clearly define your organization's learning objectives. What skills or knowledge do you want your learners to gain? Understanding your objectives will guide the entire design process, ensuring that your immersive learning experience is focused and effective. Whether it's improving employee performance, increasing customer satisfaction, or enhancing student engagement, a clear objective is essential for success.
It may not always be easy to implement new training methods or convince upper management to change your current learning style, but by setting objectives, you take the first step in establishing the need for change in your learning experiences.
2. Understand Your Audience & Focus Your Strategy:
With a large selection of tools and approaches available for immersive learning, it's easy to get overwhelmed. To create a winning strategy, focus on the specific needs of your learners and organization. For example, if your work includes high-stress situations that require quick responses, your learners would benefit from being immersed in these actual situations to learn by doing.
Virtual reality has the power to create highly realistic training experiences by tapping into our emotions. When you engage with real tools and your actual colleagues in a VR environment, it feels like you're right in your workplace, immersed in real-world scenarios. This level of immersion not only enhances the learning process but also helps trainees develop practical skills that they can apply directly to their jobs.
Once you have defined your objectives, it’s important to consider factors such as learning preferences, technical capabilities, and cost constraints. By tailoring your approach to meet these specific needs, you can create a more impactful and cost-effective immersive learning experience.
3. Choose the Right Technology:
Immersive learning experiences often rely on advanced technologies such as VR, augmented reality (AR), and virtual learning environments (VLE). While these technologies can enhance engagement and interactivity, they also can come with technical requirements and costs. If you’re looking to create the ideal ‘life-like’ immersive scenario, that could come with costs for storyboarding, 360-degree filming, and technical equipment to make it happen.
However, many fancy or expensive setups aren’t always required for effective immersive learning. Therefore, it’s important to carefully assess your technical needs and prioritize them based on their importance to achieving your learning objectives. Different immersive authoring tools allow for different immersive experiences, and picking the right one will help you allocate resources more effectively and avoid unnecessary expenses.
4. Foster Interaction and Engagement:
Immersive learning thrives on interaction and engagement. By integrating dynamic elements like simulations, scenarios, and gamification, learners actively participate in their learning experience. Different immersive elements: creating a realistic hands-on experience in realistic contexts, presenting choices and consequences, motivating learners through challenges and rewards, and enhancing enjoyment and knowledge retention.
Prioritizing interaction and engagement creates a vibrant learning environment where learners are actively involved and motivated to achieve their goals. In virtual reality environments, having interactive 3D models you can drag and drop, hotspots you can use to link one scene to another or trigger other actions, and questions that quiz your learner's knowledge, can create learning experiences that captivate learners and drive meaningful learning outcomes.
5. Numerically Pitch Your Idea:
Finally, when presenting your immersive learning strategy to stakeholders or decision-makers, be sure to pitch your idea in numerical terms. Implementing immersive learning solutions can require a significant upfront investment in technology, authoring tools, content development, and training. However, there are ways to reduce costs and maximize your return on investment.
Quantify the potential benefits, such as improved learning outcomes, increased productivity, or reduced training costs. Use data and metrics to demonstrate the ROI of your proposed strategy, highlighting the tangible value it will bring to the organization. By speaking the language of business, you can more effectively gain support and secure the resources needed to bring your immersive learning vision to life.
Ready to Create Your Winning Immersive Learning Strategy?
Need more help with building your winning immersive learning strategy? Talk to our Learning Strategy team to have us help you design, develop, and deliver learning programs, tailored to your strategic business goals.
Want to try an easy-to-use immersive learning tool? Get a free trial for a virtual reality authoring tool, CenarioVR, to immerse your learners in 360-degree environments with interactive elements.
This blog is based on a previous white paper from Trivantis, 5 Tips For Creating A Winning Immersive Learning Strategy.
