Gone are the days when the only means of learning or education were schools and afterschool programs. The education sector has witnessed a drastic transformation in the 21st century thanks to breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence, the internet of things(IoT), extended reality, and much more.
Virtual reality (VR) is one such fascinating technology that is being rapidly adopted in the educational sector, especially in educational mobile app development. VR is a booming market, and its global market value is anticipated to reach 12 billion USD by 2024, up from 4.86 billion USD.
Along with it, the market of VR headsets required to access the technology is also soaring, and the total cumulative installed bases are projected to reach 34 million by 2024, up from 16.44 million units. As VR adoption increases in the educational sector, these figures are expected to rise exponentially.
In this post, we’ll talk about VR and how it assists the educational sector in providing better, rich, and interactive learning experiences.
Virtual Reality in Educational Apps
“A good teacher, like a good entertainer, first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson,” this quote from John Henrik Clarke, an American historian, always resonates in my mind, when I look at virtual reality apps these days.
These apps jog my memory, helping me recall my school days when a particular teacher was more interactive and taught us in entertaining ways, which, in turn, made them more effective than others who just focussed on sharing theoretical knowledge. VR technology is similar to such teachers who make learning more accessible by teaching in entertaining, innovative, and interactive ways.
Let’s check out some of the exciting ways VR is transforming the educational sector through educational app development.
#1 VR offers a real experience to the students
Virtual reality is all about creating reality in a digital world, and that’s how it provides a real experience to the students. As we know, due to the ongoing pandemic in most countries and places, schools are forced to do online schooling. Mobile apps have been the greatest contributor in securing the timely education of students in these challenging times.
Integrating VR in educational apps has made the learning experience fun for the students despite the loss of glorious school days. By putting on VR headsets, students can start learning using VR integrated sessions in the apps. Even if students are in the house, it’ll make them feel like they are in their classrooms, thus providing them a real-time school experience.
#2 Practical learning
Using virtual reality, educational apps are trying to provide practical learning which is a complete diversion from the theoretical approach of learning, which is prevalent in traditional educational methods. For example, we often come across J.J. Thomson’s cathode ray tube and electron discovery experiment in chemistry.
What if we learned this discovery by watching how it was carried out and its results? Here I’m not talking about videos but the real-world experience of standing and seeing the scientist perform the discovery. VR is the technology that can make this happen. And as we say, “Actions speak louder than words,” this learning method proves to be efficient for even the most uninterested student.
Titans of Space, Anatomy and VR Lessons by ThingLink are successful educational apps that have integrated VR technology for providing better and practical learning experiences.
#3 Affordable field trips
Field trips are some of the best practices to boost interactive and fun learning experiences. But usually, these trips are limited to the native places surrounding the school or state due to budget constraints both from the school and parent sides.
VR can remove this constraint effortlessly by offering real-time virtual field trips at zero or negligible costs. These virtual field trips can be to a different country or a continent, depending on the school’s curriculum and student interest.
Discovery VR is one such app by discovery channel that offers field trips to many locations worldwide. KingTut VR is another app that schools can use to give a field trip to one of the oldest and most famous tombs of King Tutankhamun, the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Such a field trip greatly benefits the learning experience and becomes memorable for the students experiencing it.
#4 VR brings ease of understanding
Recapitulating all the three points, we can say virtual reality has made learning, grasping facts, and understanding complicated theories way easier. Even a least interested student finds it interesting to learn by using VR technology in educational apps.
Education institutions can use VR technology to explain some of the most challenging concepts to students with ease. Institutions can take the help of VR development companies to curate these curricula. Please take a look at the GoodFirms list of best virtual reality softwares if the teachers want to experiment and create some VR content on their own.
#5 VR helps in scaling education
Virtual reality doesn’t only help boost ease of learning among students but also extends their capability of learning and remembering multiple concepts at a time. Grasping a handful of concepts through books seemed rather tedious and mind-boggling, which often pushed students to take breaks after learning a single concept.
On the other hand, VR helps institutions scale students’ education and learning capabilities by assisting them to learn a variety of concepts simultaneously without bothering about students reaching their limits of learning.
Summing Up
Technologies play an important role in shaping our education system and making it compatible with the latest trends. In the last few years, we have witnessed how different technologies like AI, AR & VR are making learning easier via mobile apps.
In this post, we discussed how VR is improving the education system. VR pulls theoretical concepts out from the books and puts them into action, thus making it fun and easier to understand and memorize those concepts for every type of student.
Today developers are working on implementing extended reality, a term used for the trio of augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality in the education system to make learning easier.
