Virtual Reality is no longer a buzzword. It is here and ready to make your head spin with its ability to innovate and shape the modern world.
When it comes to online learning or E-Learning, Virtual Reality is all set to provide students an immersive and tantalizing learning environment that will improve their ability to leverage technology for educational purposes. For educators, on the other hand, it is an excellent opportunity to ante up their game and adopt the new technology as soon as possible to get ahead of the competition and make the most out of VR.
Well, the idea of creating an interactive learning space that can be accessed from the comfort of your living room is something that can change the educator sector forever. Therefore, in this post, we are going in into the world of Virtual Reality to understand what it is and how it aims to revolutionize E-Learning. So, let’s not waste even a second and dive straight into the content!
What is Virtual Reality?
Virtual Reality is a technology developed in the quest to achieve an immersive computer-generated environment – an experience that is primarily visually interactive. These computer-generated environments can execute sensory feedback, but that is limited to some cases.
As a concept, the interaction aspect of the VR technology will have to go through many challenges like people experiencing difficulty when trying to move with their VR headsets on. However, the initial development phase focuses on providing an experience that can be enjoyed by turning one’s head while keeping the body in a stationary position.
The very basic distinction of using a VR based technology is that the simulation is not triggered or provided through a screen. The engagement is entirely virtual and highly immersive. It’s not that an interactive virtual world cannot be delivered on a screen. It can be done, but then it will defeat the purpose of experiencing a highly immersive and believable virtual simulation.
There are many challenges involved when employing VR. Some of them are –
- High Price Point of Development and Installation
- Compatible and Compelling Content Creation
- Providing it the Ability to be Mobile
- Various Modern Security and Privacy Risks
- Compatibility with Existing Hardware
So, let’s get further into the content and understand how VR fairs when it comes to accessibility and adaptability.
Is Virtual Reality Technology Accessible?
Indeed. The virtual reality ecosystem is going to be a very accessible one, especially for basic applications like image viewing and gaming. For example, the Google VR Headsets, also known as Google Cardboard, is carved out of cardboard and requires affordable and straightforward construction. It is available at $20 in the market, and this makes it highly accessible. It’s suitable for primary usage. However, most of the high-quality VR headsets start at about $100, which makes accessibility an issue here.
For educators, it’s going to be a big problem if they are hoping for students to buy an online VR-based course. The growth of VR-based E-Learning might not succeed if students are made to invest that kind of money into purchasing an online course. It’s also because most students do not even own the headsets to start with the course in the first place.
How Can VR Change the E-Learning Business?
VR has the potential to give E-Learning a significant breakthrough in making education a great experience. The benefits of experiential E-Learning, when coupled with VR, are the following:
- Improves Learning Speed and Capacity: Nothing enhances learning and retention capacity of students more than performing and visualizing the subject in discussion. With powerful simulations that VR can provide, the ability to solve problems, visualize, make quick decisions will enhance when it is implemented in E-Learning.
- Provides Safe Environment for Education: VR-based E-Learning doesn’t just offer an interactive learning experience, and it also provides students a safe learning environment where making mistakes is encouraged. After all, that’s how you learn. In this safe, controlled environment, students can be encouraged to take multiple approaches to help themselves understand the subject better.
- Gives Practicality a Preference: Education is only useful when applied to bring out results. Generally, students are used to learning theory from their textbooks but don’t know what the implications of the teaching are is in real life. VR can help them realize the potential of their knowledge by bridging the gap between theory and practice.
- Boosts Students Engagement Levels: Educators can get great results from their students only if the learning experience is made engaging. Virtual Reality is a great tool to make E-Learning a collaborative affair. Students will learn from each other skills, which will improve the overall engagement on any E-Learning platform.
- Makes Complex Learning Easier: Virtual Reality can indeed help students learn their desired skills using a simulation that ranges from the most complicated topics to the simplest ones. This can bring the process of learning back to life and help master any skill in a better way.
- Increased Level of Tolerance for Diversity: E-Learning can be taken a notch up by making students coming from different parts of the world come together online and share the same online virtual space. This can promote diversity, and students will be able to be part of group-based activities. It can help students gain different perspectives on the topics being taught.
Virtual Reality can make a difference in a learner’s life by adding so much value to the present education system.
However, one question that needs to be answered is – Can VR-based E-Learning take over the education system as a primary teaching platform or can only be considered as a supplementary learning tool?
Well, only time can tell. There you have it. I hope this piece of content brought great value to you. Since you are here, don’t forget to check out our new platform Askademic and feel free to share your opinion.
Happy Learning!
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