In Italy, when I was in high school, I chose to go to a high school called Liceo Classico, where you could study literature, philosophy, ancient Greek, Latin…. It was only at the School of Economics a few years later that I realized I had to relearn everything related to math and exact sciences.
Going back to the classic high school, I remember that the classes were all very theoretical. Knowledge was passed on in such a non-engaging and overwhelming way that I often found myself playing games on my mobile, to say the least, I was totally out of focus.
At the same time, the classes were long, and we had to spend a lot of time at school and had to dedicate much more time than necessary to learning topics that, if passed on more objectively, would have taken us much less time. Because it was so uninteresting, I felt everything so distant and I wasn't even remotely emotionally connected to what I was learning. The result? Even though I was a great student and had great grades, to this day I don't really remember most of what I learned back then.
What if I had a time machine and could go back to ancient Rome and Greece, sit in a public square to listen and reason directly with Socrates or the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, wouldn't I have learned more?
"But Andrea, time machines don't exist!", I know but there is something very close to that, something called Metaverse - which allows us to recreate these experiences. And it is specifically about how Virtual Reality and the Metaverse manage to transform education (corporate as well) that we will dive in this article.
Let me start by telling you about Strivr. Strivr is a company that offers a VR training platform with a very high number of employees in mind – unlike Meta, Microsoft and Apple, which are aimed at consumers and not employees. Strivr's challenge is to think about how to train people on high scalability through VR headsets.
The advantages are clear: When you put on a headset for 20-25 minutes, you get the same learning outcome as watching a PowerPoint lecture for three hours. At the same time, situations like working on a Ford assembly line where cars pass every 15 seconds and the glasses are telling me exactly what to do, reduces risks and optimizes learning.
All of this is proven by a recent study by PwC, which aimed to measure the impact of Soft Skills training on employees using 3 different methods: classroom, e-learning and metaverse. And the results were amazing! They had 5 key learnings where VR training performed best along the axes of speed, confidence, emotional connection, focus, and price.
What are these learnings, specifically?
1.Employees on VR courses can be trained up to four times faster. US employees typically spend only 1% of their work week on training and development, so employers need to be sure they use this time productively. That's where VR can help. What usually would take two hours to learn in a classroom could be learned in just 30 minutes using VR.
2. Also, VR students are more confident in applying what they've learned.
By providing the ability to practice in an immersive, low-stress environment, VR-based training results in higher levels of confidence and an enhanced ability to actually apply learning on the job. In fact, VR-trained learners were up to 275% more confident to act on what they learned after training – a 40% improvement over classroom and 35% improvement over e-learning training.
3. Employees are more emotionally connected to VR content.
People connect, understand, and remember things more deeply when their emotions are involved, and here VR students felt 3.75 times more emotionally connected to content than classroom students and 2.3 times more connected than classroom students. than those who did the e-learning. Three-quarters of students surveyed said that during the VR course on diversity and inclusion, they had a moment of awakening and realized that they weren't as inclusive as they thought they were.
4. On top of that, VR students are more focused.
Today's students are often impatient, distracted and overwhelmed. Many students don't watch a video to its entire duration, and smartphones are a major cause of interruption and distraction.
With VR learning, users are significantly less distracted. In a VR headset, simulations and immersive experiences command the individual's vision and attention. There are no interruptions or multitasking options. In the PwC study, VR-trained employees were up to four times more focused during training than their e-learning peers and 1.5 times more focused than their classroom peers. When learners are immersed in a VR experience, they tend to get more out of the training and have better results.
5.
5. And lastly, the icing on top of the cake is that VR learning can be more economical at scale…thanks to companies like Strivr!
In the past, VR was too expensive, complicated and challenging to deploy outside of a small group. Today, the cost of a corporate headset is a one-time fee of less than $1,000, and these units can be managed like any other corporate mobile device and can be used repeatedly to deliver training. The study shows that when delivered to a sufficient number of students, it is estimated that VR training is more cost-effective at scale than classroom or e-learning. As VR content initially requires up to 48% more investment than similar classroom or e-learning courses, having enough students to help realize this economy of scale is critical. With 375 students, VR training achieved parity in cost with classroom learning. With 3,000 students, VR training became 52% more cost-effective than classroom training. With 1,950 students, VR training has achieved cost parity with e-learning. The more people you train, the greater your return in terms of employee time saved during training, as well as course facilitation and other direct cost savings.
That's why The Academy, Bank of America's corporate university, was the first financial services company to launch virtual training programs at its 4,300 branches last fall. The Academy has released around 30 VR learning modules this year, from conversations with a customer or employee to crisis management situations. John Jordan, head of The Academy, said that When they first tested the program in 2019, 97% of participants felt more comfortable performing their tasks after the VR training.
"How to start, you're probably wondering, because I don't doubt you're already imagining the skepticism people might have in the face of this. Well, John Jordan gives us some tips: if someone is considering how VR can play a role in their L&D program, we would encourage them to try it, because there is skepticism, of course, but that once you try it you can see the difference compared to any other teaching method."
Looking to the future, Jordan says the Academy won't stop until they have a headset in every financial center in the US. They are exploring VR programs to address issues like mental health and helping people relax, empathy training and diversity and inclusion programs, among others.
While Jordan says there will always be value in real interactions and real handshakes, he doesn't want to rule out every employee having a VR device as new generations grow up with the technology at their disposal.
The Academy hopes to have a million hands-on sessions in simulated learning experiences by 2023 – Jordan sees this as a million opportunities to improve.
Impressive, isn't it?
That's why we need to understand that the Metaverse, and its associated technologies, allow us to maximize the return on our investments in Training and Development, and to be more effective.
Let's look at the medical field: Medical training – and particularly surgical training – has been complex and a high risk task to manage. It is difficult to gain familiarity with the human body without access to real bodies. This isn't always simple when patient lives are at stake.
This is changing with VR:
In 2020, Johnson & Johnson partnered with Osso VR and distributed nearly 200 Oculus Quest headsets to surgeons across the US. Spinology, a manufacturer of spine surgery devices, has partnered with Ghost Productions, a VR surgical simulation developer, to integrate VR-based training for its sales teams. Spineology aims to educate salespeople on their devices so they can improve engagement with medical providers.
In terms of AR, companies like Aris MD and Echopixel are looking to gain a foothold in this space. Aris MD provides 3D views of the patient's anatomy, allowing the surgeon to perform the procedure in virtual space. Meanwhile, Echopixel creates a 'digital twin' of a patient using standard medical images, allowing doctors to experience that image as an 'interactive 4D hologram'.
This could radically change the way medical students study, but also how surgeons are trained!
Generally speaking, if we think about education today, it's still a legacy of an analogue world - and corporate education isn't that different either. If we look at classrooms, they haven't changed that much over the last few decades - while the world has changed radically! That's why we have to be open to scenarios where XR and the metaverse allow us to learn and teach others - whether our students or collaborators - in a more focused, assertive, engaging way, to finally get what we all want: not just the theoretical knowledge, but the ability to apply learning to the business.
