It’s 2020; time to mix things up. I didn’t write a blog this month, but John Helmer, creator of the Learning Hack podcast, was kind enough to invite me to record an episode with him. He wanted to create an episode on learning design for unusual mediums.
But how unusual is it to design learning for virtual reality? Designing for a real-world environment (albeit a simulated one) is arguably more natural than trying to flatten everything into a 2D plane. Either way and regardless of your medium, the principles of a good learning journey remain the same – we just need to find new and relevant ways to interpret them.
For example, grabbing attention is the first part of any learning journey. Gagne knew it. We all know it. But how you grab attention in a VR experience will be very different to how you do that in an eLearning module and different again to a face-to-face session or even a VILT.
As it’s still a relatively new medium, virtual reality creates a lot of excitement and even trepidation for a lot of people. With that in mind, we’ve found that slowing building anticipation through storytelling and giving people time to get used to their environment, seems to be the most effective way to gain attention in VR training.
But that’s likely to change over the years as people become more accustomed to virtual reality experiences. Potentially, it’ll take more extreme, arresting interactions to get people’s attention in the future. But that’s not right for audiences now.
For me, this is what makes immersive learning design such a great industry to be working in. What’s right now, will almost certainly look different in ten years’ time. That doesn’t make what we’re producing today, lesser or unrealised. It’s just one of many necessary steps we need to take, to start this very exciting journey.
John and I cover this point and more in our conversation. You can listen to the full episode here:
Or if you still need convincing, you can listen to the trailer, here.
We’re always happy to talk to you about how immersive technologies can engage your employees and customers. If you have a learning objective in mind, or simply want to know more about emerging technologies like VR, AR, or AI, send us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.