What is the future of learning?

New technologies are quickly combining in the learning and training environments. While it generally well known that we all learn in different ways, it’s becoming widely accepted that learning accompanies doing. When applying this, it becomes quite difficult and expensive to bring people to the field for a true hands-on experience. The hands-on experiences are invaluable and expensive to achieve, or are they?

Along comes new technologies that allow many the opportunity to simulate a field experience – in the comfort of a classroom or even at the home office. Concepts such as “Intelligent Immersive Reality Learning” are delivering actionable insights that quickly improve the competency of students and workers.

A growing use-case of these techniques include first measuring the baseline user competencies and charting a path toward greater end capabilities. Often, it’s now feasible to increase capabilities of 80% of participants with only a few powerful sessions. Then, additive technology with both hardware and software can be applied to efficiently scale the learning process. Fusing visual, virtual, wearable, biometric, haptic and immersive realistic environments create the best of all worlds – efficient and nearly real-world experiences.

Commercial applications are borrowing a page from the military, where simulation centric scenarios are often used more frequently. As an example, in the healthcare industry thousands of skilled workers have dropped out of the labor force due to Covid surges and burn-out. Additive technology coupled with automated AI type analysis gives instructors the insight to create “live virtual-construct” training and test various approaches with students in healthcare. Students’ opt-in to wearing biometric devices (often just a smart watch) that measure their levels of attention, engagement and retention of the material being taught.

Visual stimulation in the form of environments written in software such as UnReal, allow both efficiency and a near real-world training experience. Hardware technology advances such as perfect pitch LED walls and VR devices elevate the entire simulation-based training experience. Technologists can also create seemingly rare scenarios that would be very difficult to produce in real-world and the benefit is to stretch the boundaries of each student – often preparing them to better handle contingencies and with greater confidence.

The future of learning and training will utilize technology to create MORE.

More efficient, more effective and more people will be trained and taught this way – paving the way to proven methods of measurements.