How Immersive Learning Prepares Students for the Future

Remember your first school field trip to the zoo? Or browsing bones at the natural history museum? Or learning how to milk a cow at a local farm? While most of our school experiences fade over time, a memorable field trip stands out long after the classroom lectures have been forgotten.

“Our teachers knew what they were doing when they took us on field trips,” says James McCrary, director of innovative teaching & learning at River Parishes Community College in Louisiana. “They weren’t asking us to do work. They were asking us to experience and talk about these things.”

Field trips can be powerful learning experiences whose benefits are difficult to measure and quantify. And with tightening school budgets, rising transportation costs, increasing pressure to improve standardized test scores, and the liabilities that accompany taking a group of students to a public place, these experiential learning opportunities are disappearing from many schools.

But McCrary sees a new opportunity emerging with immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, which can safely and cost-effectively transport students out of the classroom and into a learning experience that’s just as vivid and memorable in its own way.

“We can bring those types of experiences and that type of learning to more students than ever through the power of augmented and virtual reality,” he says. “For a very, very low cost prospectively, they can have an experience that will impact their learning.”

Tangible benefits of immersive learning

While some educators question whether VR in the classroom is just a shinier version of watching an educational movie, others see a host of benefits in learning with immersive technology.

Imagine the difference between reading about Earth’s tectonic plates in a textbook and holding a model of the planet in your hands — one you can take apart piece by piece to see how the plates interact with each other. Or the difference between looking at pictures taken by the Mars Rover and walking around on the surface of the red planet. Or labeling the parts of the circulatory system on a worksheet versus exploring the human body from the inside.

The power of immersive learning, many believe, lies in its ability to allow students to experience and interact with new information in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Here are three reasons to try virtual and augmented reality in your classroom or school.