How VR In Education Will Change How We Learn And Teach

Education is the base for a thriving society, and the transfer of knowledge has been a top priority for civilizations since the very beginning. People are constantly looking for ways to make knowledge transfer more easily, more quickly, and more effectively.

In the era of digital devices, we have an opportunity to enable better learning with technology. Virtual Reality (VR) seems to be the natural next step for the evolution of education.

In this article, I’ll show how virtual reality can transform the way educational content is delivered.

How we learn today

Before diving into the details of how VR in education will help improve the learning process, it’s important to understand why we need to improve the quality of education in the first place. Historically, most technologies designed to aid learning have been aimed at enabling access to information — facts and observations about the world. Before computers, we had a powerful tool that helped us retain facts: books.

Image by Sylvia Yang.

In the era of digital technologies, books are being turned into eBooks. Modern search engines make fact-finding really easy — with just a few clicks you can discover answers to many questions.

While knowledge has become more easily available for more people, the current approach to education has two significant problems:

It’s based on the same old format — fact retention. Teaching methods are focused on providing facts; however, having access to and consuming a lot of information isn’t learning. Being informed isn’t the same as being educated.

A lot of people have difficulties comprehending information. Too much information received in a short period of time can easily overwhelm students. As a result, they become bored, disengaged, and usually not sure why they are learning about a topic in the first place.