Low Learner Engagement? Combat the Challenge With Immersive Learning!

Getting learners’ attention is simple; keeping them interested during the session is another matter. Matters get even more challenging if you live in a time when distractions are commonplace. Again, the contemporary dynamics of work from home (WFH) are rife with diversions that sap learner concentration during online courses. Then how do you handle it? Immersive learning serves as the answer, of course. We discuss how your L&D teams may employ immersive learning to tackle the problem of employee engagement in the following sections.

Immersive Learning: A Plan To Transform The Learning Experience

The world of today is more technologically advanced and distracted than ever! Frequent interruptions often have detrimental effects on the educational process. The challenge is now how to reduce these disturbances and improve and maximize performance. Immersive learning can be the solution, though!

It refers to a method that facilitates learning through the use of an artificial setting. Offering engaging visualizations not only eliminates interruptions but also eliminates boredom in the learning and development process. Here is all the information you require about immersive learning, how it alters the corporate education landscape, and how it can combat low employee engagement in organizational training.

What Is Immersive Learning?

To deliver memorable learning experiences, conventional teaching methods depended on media like audio, paper, and videos. Newer approaches leverage additional senses, including sound, vision, or touch, to create more holistic learning encounters that encourage greater learner engagement, whereas older approaches can only drive limited student engagement.

A strategy for delivering digital learning sessions that goes beyond conventional passive learning, in which trainers lecture and students listen, see, and take notes, is known as immersive learning.

Immersive training aims to increase the level of involvement of virtual students during the learning process. They work together, practice, perform, and experiment within their immersive surroundings to achieve this.

How Can Immersive Learning Alter the Corporate Training Landscape?

Although it may be simple to get students’ interest in this day of distractions, the largest issue is keeping them motivated during the entire learning session. Because of this, a technology that may increase class participation is required in order to increase the effectiveness and value of education. An artificial and simulated setting is utilized as a part of methods to allow students to immerse themselves in the learning experience fully. It can bring hypothetical learning settings to life, rendering the crucial yet challenging process of having students recreate genuine interactions.

By relating their learning to real-world situations in a secure setting, immersive learning gives learners control over the consequences. As people gain control over the virtual environment they are in, it increases participation in addition to levels of motivation. It also offers users a very interactive atmosphere, both electronically and physically, which is an intriguing feature. This allows you to digitally reproduce various real locations inaccessible within the confines of a class. Digital information is so inspiring that it profoundly impacts an employee’s mentality.

What Sets Immersive Learning Apart From Experiential Learning?

Even though they are closely connected, experiential and immersive learning should not be mistaken. The key distinctions between experiential and immersive learning are listed below.

Immersive learning significantly utilizes technology, including portable devices, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), etc. Here, the learners’  thinking capacity must be at 100%, and it always incorporates game-based learning into lessons. Immersive learning includes dynamism in mechanics, and knowledge acquisition occurs when a realization is made possible. Here, multiple iterations might result from a single activity.

In experiential learning, tech is not used frequently and often calls for less than 100% of students’ mental capacity. The training is not inherently linked to games and is mechanically static. Learning occurs via developing a skill, and a  single iteration consists of several activities.

A World Without Interruptions

How challenging it becomes to maintain focus, particularly when employees have got that cherished smartphone close at hand! Consider immersive learning because it can help you focus by immersing people in a stunning virtual world.

In fact, immersive learning is necessary in today’s world because it possesses the potential to improve learning more than any other method, much to how educational ERP software altered how administrative activities were managed decades ago. See the advice in the following paragraphs to discover the many advantages of this cutting-edge method.

Intensive immersion

Opening a book is simple; closing one is more difficult. Because it encourages intense absorption, experts today advocate immersive learning. There’s no room for pausing between activities because learners are absorbed in the virtual simulations.

Emotional resonance

Immersive learning fosters an emotional connection with users because the surroundings it creates are so genuine and compelling. Employees participate more actively in the process of learning as a result.
higher motivation.

With this teaching method, students are urged to participate in a representation of an actual setting while being engaged in the real world.

A method of individualized education

Due to the learner-centered theory of learning on which it is founded, immersive learning encourages personalized learning. In addition to receiving guided practices to achieve proficiency in a skill, behavior, or system, it helps students to take their time and learn. They are free to practice as often as necessary until they are fluent.

Greater retention of information

Employees may learn at their own pace and are fully involved in the education process because there are minimal interruptions, which helps them recall more of the information they learn.

The Challenge of Low Learner Engagement

As more people work from locations outside their typical workplaces, organizational relationships have changed, causing widespread anxiety and diversions. It is incredibly challenging to conduct digital instruction in this setting since it is tough to maintain remote learners’ attention and engagement.

The outcome? A generalized lack of optimizing the usage of organizational training resources, decreased program completion rates, and rising levels of alienation from remote training. These issues can be solved by offering a variety of immersive learning opportunities to remote workers.

What Supports Employees’ Engagement and Cognitive Development in Immersive Learning?

Disengagement is bred by monotony. It’s incredibly simple for “bored” trainees to disconnect in today’s virtual working and learning environment. How can L&D teams increase learner engagement whilst delivering an enjoyable, effective training program? This is their main problem.

The solution is to use learning strategies like immersive training to engage students on a range of levels, including logical (logos), moral (ethos), and emotional (emotio).

To provide an immersive learning experience, instructors can make use of a range of supplementary technologies and techniques alongside monitored discussions, use cases, and practice assignments.

An immersive training program increases participants’ desire to learn, which promotes learner engagement. Involved learners are those who actively participate in the educational process as opposed to acting as passive observers or information consumers. They gain more and use what they have learned far more successfully on the job than inactive learners.

The delivery of information in a simulated space and its remote reception are two aspects of this interactive learning experience. Effective absorption (and then the subsequent application) of newly acquired knowledge depends on learner involvement. In two unique ways, various immersive learning strategies assist this process:

A virtual immersive learning experience, as opposed to other Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) methodologies, imparts content in a manner that enthralls and retains remote learners.

Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, immersive training enables online students to put their newly acquired problem-solving, decision-making, as well as critical thinking skills into practice in a secure virtual setting.

Collaborating with instructors, other students, and coworkers remotely immerse individuals in training courses and increase learner engagement.

What Are Some of the Ways to Deploy Immersive Immersive Learning in Your Firm for Enhanced Learner Engagement?

To give a digital trainee a truly immersive learning experience, L&D professionals can employ a variety of tactics, approaches, and technologies. These might incorporate gamification, interactive narrative, branching simulations, or real-world use cases.

Smartphone apps, virtual reality, augmented reality, and video-based productivity assistance tools are some more immersive training techniques that can help learners fully submerge themselves in the training environment. The following is a list of the technologies used to execute immersive learning in your corporate instruction:

Virtual reality or VR

This technology simulates real-world events via computer simulations. Putting on a headset enables the individual to fully immerse themselves in the digital world and visit even the most remote locations.

Augmented reality or AR

Augmented reality technology transforms actual surroundings into a digital interface, boosting user perception of the physical world. AR enhances reality by adding digital components to it.

Mixed reality (MR)

MR, or mixed reality, is a technique that makes digital interactions appear more realistic by combining AR with VR. Real-time interaction between physical and digital items is made possible by MR.

3D immersive learning

A method known as 3D immersive learning uses 3D simulators and visuals to give consumers an interactive experience while encouraging in-depth understanding.

Use cases

Develop holistic use cases that are meaningful because virtual learners are more engaged with business scenarios that they can identify with. Make your narrative, case studies, and setting as realistic as you can.

Inclusion of frequently occurring learner engagement elements

More than merely replacing text-based notes with films or virtual reality content is needed to provide a holistic learning experience. Wherever possible, incorporate interactivity, inputs, experimentation, and chances for collaboration throughout the training program to offer a genuinely immersive educational experience.

Engaging technological learning experiences

Learners won’t be compelled to engage themselves with the training program and interact with the information simply by transferring existing training materials to an online setting.  To have immersive learning experiences that foster engagement, your L&D teams should learn to utilize technology — like VR, AI, and AR, in conjunction with additional strategies — gamification, branched simulations, and scenario-based learning.

Gamification

By injecting fun and competition – along with recognition and rewards – across its learning path, gamification creates a captivating immersive training experience that intrigues learners to participate.

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Story-based learning

Narratives appeal to distant trainees at a more intimate level as compared to traditional learning methodologies. They, thus, promote stronger student engagement and lead to greater recall and retrieval of teaching materials.

Next-gen strategies

To encourage higher learner engagement, L&D teams may leverage next-generation techniques, such as app-based training, microlearning, mobile learning, and AI-driven predictive learning.

Video-based learning

It gives sticky educational experiences, performance assistance for on-the-job efficiency, and immersive training opportunities to involve students while they are studying on the go. It also creates an atmosphere where distant learners can submerge themselves in studying.

Scenario-based learning

This method facilitates learner behavior modification and enhances long-term performance by motivating learners to interact with the situations that are provided.

Final thoughts

Carefully curated immersive learning experiences greatly increase learners’ engagement with virtual training. Additionally, it increases student retention, which boosts program completion rates. Furthermore, increased learner engagement promotes higher information retention, more effective behavior adjustment, and overall increases in job performance.

Immersive learning serves as an agile approach that can improve eLearning and transform the educational landscape. The method has a remarkable chance to shape corporate education’s future and assist in achieving some of its most critical and unmet objectives. The greatest time to take advantage of it is right now, as it offers a wide range of outstanding advantages and has the potential to revolutionize curriculum and instruction. Organizations should therefore favor learning management systems that facilitate immersive learning.

We hope that this post offers the necessary understanding of how L&D professionals might employ immersive learning to tackle the issue of learner engagement. In the interim, please get in touch with us or leave a message below should you have any particular questions.

Ad: PlayAblo’s Enterprise-Grade Micro-Learning platform is built for millennial learners. Micro-Learning, assessments, and gamification features ensure learning outcome measurement and sustained engagement.
Find out more and request a custom demo!