How Extended Reality Is Shaping Learning At Work
Discover how XR technology transforms workforce training and development with immersive experiences.
Extended reality (XR) is revolutionizing experiences across industries by providing an immersive learning experience for employees, allowing them to practice and build confidence in a pressure-free environment. Phil Moore, director of strategic initiatives at Cornerstone, explores how XR is reshaping the way we learn.
Extended Reality (XR), an all-encompassing term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, is still something we associate more closely with gaming and entertainment than the workforce. We’re still more likely to encounter XR technology outside of work than we are through our company’s learning and development (L&D) department. Yet, the immersive learning use cases are growing and easy to spot, whether safely delivering high-risk job training, like oil drilling or medical surgery, or real-life interpersonal simulations, like customer service training or even leadership development.
XR technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we learn by providing an immersive experience. But the question is, how can organizations put it to practical use? Let’s explore the possibilities of this cutting-edge technology and how it can help us achieve our educational goals.
How Learning is Evolving
It’s a nuanced point, but how humans learn hasn’t changed. What is changing rapidly is the context and environments in which we learn. Practice, learning by doing, guided instruction, on-the-job training, etc., are not new concepts. However, individualized apprenticeships or building expertise through decades of tenure is exceedingly rare. Even the in-person classroom learning model has been upended in the post-COVID world. If that wasn’t enough, the global rate of change – organizational, technological, socio-political – requires skill sets to constantly be refreshed and reinvented to address the deep workforce readiness gap and address the evolving needs of the workforce.
While learning functions have worked hard to keep up through self-paced eLearning, virtual webinars, on-demand videos, etc., it’s easy to wonder if we’ve done so at the expense of being engaging and effective. In fact, new Cornerstone research shows that while 80% of employers think their workforce receives adequate training, only 42% of employees agree.
This shows a clear need to help humans learn (like we always have), and this new context, coupled with big technological leaps, has created prime conditions for XR.
Why XR?
Immersive learning allows employees to practice, make mistakes, and learn from them by creating realistic, scenario-based learning, which creates a more hands-on learning approach that complements other learning methods for a holistic, agile approach. This technology can be especially helpful for organizations looking to improve their workforce readiness. Cornerstone data revealed that 92% of employers feel confident in their ability to develop their employees’ skills. Still, only 42% of employees say they receive the proper training to do their jobs well. XR can help bridge that learning gap.
Firstly, XR is inherently interactive and engaging, providing an ‘active learning’ experience that increases learner motivation and retention. Secondly, XR creates not only a safer physical environment but also a psychologically safe environment to practice. Gathering immediate feedback in a non-threatening way creates a mental state conducive to learning. Lastly, XR’s adaptive capabilities create a personalized learning experience that evolves with the learners’ behavior.
Additionally, XR helps address the elephant in the room – paying attention is hard. Creating learner engagement has never been more challenging, but immersive learning through XR helps learners enter the environment and focus.
Why Now?
While immersive learning’s benefits through XR (improved engagement and effectiveness) are compelling, its skeptics often point to other challenges. After all, L&D functions have long been intrigued by VR, but the cost, logistics, and expertise required have prevented wide-scale adoption. However, the tide is turning, and so is the skepticism.
1. GenAI, what else?
GenAI is seemingly revolutionizing everything, including how we create content. This is a huge boon for XR. GenAI makes creating XR content easier and more impactful. Firstly, structuring the overall learning experience, from defining learning and skills goals to authoring branching scenarios, is far easier with GenAI. Secondly, our ability to generate stunning visuals and dynamic worlds using GenAI has become cost-effective and possible for those without technical skills. And maybe most importantly, creating realistic characters with a huge range of lifelike interactions opens a new virtual world of possibilities. Emotional intelligence is vital for today’s workplace, and integrating emotional responses in learning better prepares learners for real-life application and further boosts engagement and retention.
2. More Accessible Hardware
The traditional roadblock of obtaining and managing XR hardware becomes less daunting as hardware costs decrease. Comparing the costs of some in-person training events (space, travel, lodging, catering, facilitation, etc.) with the repeatability and portability of XR headsets now often favors XR. Furthermore, many XR experiences can be ported to a desktop experience, deploying a metaverse learning environment, for example, which can still create a much more engaging experience than traditional learning formats.
3. From Niche to Normal
Whether you are looking at Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta’s Quest 3, or Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, XR has become mainstream. While we may still be in the early adopter phase, the XR market is accelerating toward the early majority. This is important not only for the availability of hardware but also for the buy-in of budget holders and learners alike. Securing funding and driving adoption is much easier when there’s existing experience from the consumer market. This rings doubly true as GenZ continues to enter the workforce, where XR drives engagement and employee value proposition.
4. Recognizing XR Versatility
Many people typically associate XR technology with immersive gaming experiences or futuristic entertainment, overlooking its transformative capabilities in other domains. In reality, XR technology can revolutionize how we train healthcare professionals, design and visualize complex engineering projects, enhance classroom learning experiences, improve customer engagement in retail environments, and even provide virtual tourism experiences.
By recognizing XR’s versatility and understanding its potential to reshape multiple industries, we can move beyond this common misconception that it is limited to entertainment and explore its wide-ranging applications for innovation and improvement in diverse fields.
See More: Designing Your Learning and Development Strategy
How to Get Started
1. Be Intentional
The biggest difference between creating meaningful learning experiences and simple fascination with technology is use case clarity. As with all learning initiatives, business needs, learning goals, and overall use cases should be clear. Identify where XR can have the biggest impact on the business and start there, for example, areas with the highest risk or revenue impact, require hands-on practice or historically lacked engagement or effectiveness.
2. Embrace XR’s Accessibility
Adopting XR technology has become increasingly accessible and straightforward due to the maturity of solutions available in today’s marketplace. This is largely due to the improvements made in hardware, software, and development tools by some of the industry’s biggest players, such as HTC Vive, Lenovo, Meta, and Apple. Now, both individuals and organizations can easily incorporate XR into their workflows. There are many options available for using XR in different applications, including no-code XR creation tools, with many resources such as immersive content libraries and easy-to-follow tutorials available to make adoption a breeze. As XR technology continues to mature, it’s becoming more accessible and possible for everyone to use its transformative potential.
3. Test It Out
Once the most impactful use cases are identified, test it out with a small section of the organization. Not only can this reveal valuable lessons on how to manage the new modality, but it can also provide learning effectiveness data. Perform an A/B test with different populations and measure key aspects like learner engagement, retention, and applied behaviors. This data can help identify improvements and new use cases and answer questions on ROI, preparing you for broader deployment.
Immersive learning through XR is engaging, effective, and more practical than ever. In ongoing efforts to adapt to our rapidly changing context and to engage with employees, we must stop trying incremental improvements on old ways of learning and adopt entirely new approaches. We can do just that by combining the new power of GenAI and XR technology to serve the age-old need of learning by doing.
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