immerse education essay competition

immerse education essay competition

The Significance of Immersive Education in the 21st Century: An In-Depth Analysis

1. Introduction: Understanding Immersive Education

Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino attempt a definition for a ‘continuum’ of undefined ‘extent’ between real and virtual by introducing terminology such as Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality, and Augmented Virtuality. A practical definition used in research for immersive education environments includes systems that have a heightened sense of presence and are learned through ‘doing’, making choices, and interacting with environments and/or story, as opposed to learning through lecturing. Ruti G. Teitel, editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, when asked to contribute to various ideas of immersive education, went back to when the Virtual Reality experience of ‘Dyslexia/Emilie’ was installed in the London Science Museum in 1999 and watched young children immersed for hours in the environment perched atop a high platform. The need to interact and learn became evident as the young children took on the role of a BA pilot every five minutes, attempting to lead virtual Emily’s plane from Heathrow to Schipol, before attempting to ride the virtual baggage carousel around and into the terminal. This paper describes how immersive education has become a recent focus in education and how what a student learns is influenced by four key concepts.

1. Introduction In the 21st century, where the demand for creativity and innovation is at its peak, the process of education has shifted from traditional teaching methods to principles based on practical knowledge. The seed of immersive education was sown out of the increasing significance of practical experience. This education involves greater experimentation and interaction, merging the real and virtual worlds. Immersive education environments allow for real-world experiences to be better understood in alternative platforms such as games, curriculum, and social systems that improve knowledge, cognition, and empathy.

2. The Evolution of Educational Technology

The many varied advances in educational technology, starting with 1836’s use of blackboards and paper and ending as instructors began to incorporate such interactive educational materials as electronic whiteboards, interactive computer simulations, and hypermedia content, necessarily influenced the development of immersive learning, given that students are often comfortable with and enjoy technology. Teachers and adult trainers use immersive environments as a tool to get through to students and increase information retention. The evolution of educational technology, therefore, supports an expectation that immersive learning and VR will make a valuable contribution to the learning process in the future.

As the societal reliance upon advanced technological innovation has become universal in the 21st century, the educational landscape necessarily has evolved to take advantage of the latest tools and techniques. This age builds upon a strong history of innovation that began with such advances as blackboards and paper, progressing into film, radio, overhead projectors, television, and desktop computers in the classroom. Because of these advances, many of today’s students have grown up experiencing educational technologies at an early age and expect equivalent applications as they begin higher education or enter the workforce. Immersive education is just the latest step in a progression that traces the development of the field and the ongoing influence of virtual reality (VR), computer-generated environments, and simulations in education.

3. Benefits and Challenges of Immersive Learning Environments

There are both challenges and advantages in preparing education systems for immersive learning environments. Benefits may include moving away from a lecture-based format toward increased active and explorative learning. This format of education is more in alignment with today’s learners’ needs, who appreciate practical experiences and authentic learning situations. As with any new implementation, there are also challenges associated with introducing a new technology that requires a substantial initial investment. There are also issues of practicality due to the resources and time necessary. Some universities have shown a successful decline in barriers by introducing immersive learning technologies slowly and strategically, and finances were not a factor in their achieved success. Simply put, few instructors can move into immersive experiences without thoughtful, planned strategies. Successful learning is based on collaboration, and for an educator to go at it alone can make the transition even more overwhelming. Additionally, such endeavors will also require a well-designed support system and need backing from various administrative departments including Information Technology (IT), faculty development, and the library to be successful. Finally, there is a strong need for sharing successful practices to be seen as a strong aspect of the development and integration of an immersive learning environment. This further supports the strong need and conveys the shift that will be involved in promoting collaboration and transitioning to such formats.

Is immersive education in the 21st century an effective way to engage and teach students? A discussion of the current benefits and potential drawbacks serves as a starting point in determining the answer to this question. Student engagement should be the focal point of effective educational practices, and it is an essential factor in increased retention of information. Skills developed in an immersive environment have been consistently supported by the existing literature as fundamentally important in gaining employment. Regardless of domain, fully engaging students tends to result in increased retention of information. Creating active participants in the learning experience significantly increases the likelihood that they will remember the content. Active participation has also been found to reduce anxiety in students. These animals are not only responsible for meeting the academic and professional needs of a new population of nontraditional university students but are an example of the students who have not engaged in immersive and hands-on learning experiences. With increased fear in retention rates in higher education, the call for effective, active teaching methodologies is critical. In summary, data supporting the move to immersive educational experience for the 21st-century learner is strong enough to warrant one’s careful consideration.

4. Case Studies and Success Stories

The Technical Training Exercise (TTX) is a sophisticated player-driven simulation that helps participants learn the intricacies of the federal incident management system. Participants learn about group leadership, information flow within the organization, distributed decision-making, role clarity, and the integration of management and technical levels. Data collected during many sessions of the TTX provide empirical support for our thesis that immersive experience enhances learning and attitudes. Based on experience running this program for a decade, we are able to show: 1) that participants in the player-driven simulation outperform their counterparts in traditional learning environments; 2) that the more successful players had similar success within the TTX and also transferred their learning to non-replay TTXs; and 3) that these gains carried over to the traditional multiple-choice instrument. Though subject to a variety of inchoate methodological flaws, this research has reached “criterion” status involving results from over 20,000 participants.

To showcase the value of immersive education, we have developed a number of case studies that demonstrate the use of virtual worlds to push the envelope of instruction and research collaboration. A snapshot of each case study is offered here, along with a number of best practices related to building and maintaining a successful immersive learning environment. These case studies were chosen because they offered us observational evidence of the power of place as context.

Much has been written about the promise and potential pitfalls of immersive education. We would like to share a few case studies and success stories to demonstrate how educators and others have used immersive learning platforms to create magical moments – times where students were engaged and supported as they embraced what it means to be truly immersed in a complex, real-world environment.

5. Future Trends and Implications for Education

On the other hand, this discussion can be more academically-oriented. The goal is to show how this shift could have a considerable impact on two aspects of education. First, on teaching styles, with a shift towards more immersive and experiential methods and a consequent focus on student-teacher competency. The second aspect would point to the need to utilize evaluative methods geared towards the new modes of learning and the development of immersive studies. The shift to more immersive, competency-learning could fundamentally alter the academic landscape, with perhaps increasing rates of academic integrity issues, or students feeling more discomfort during examinations, or students and teachers having different curriculum development ideas and expectations. It could also lead to shifts in liberal art education, focusing more on hands-on experience to complement textbook learning. It may also change teacher training expectations and options, moving more towards training of real-world experiences to provide a stronger understanding of what one needs to learn for their own classes rather than bookish teaching methodology. This could also extend into changes in the professional world, with new concepts in initial and ongoing training in the workplace possibly changing too, though both would be outside the purview of this volume. The work of the future may indeed be different from the work of the past, the issue of what people learn for work, how long they will be able to work and the changes they make bound to alter in a dynamically changing society.

One way of looking towards future trends and changes in the domain of education is to focus on the many technological advancements and developments that have taken place. This includes looking into, for example, themes such as the current state and predictability of technology, and an understanding of advances in augmented and virtual reality. Such a discussion would draw on predictions and trends concerning how people will live, work, and interact, particularly given some of the broader key global trends, such as population growths and declines, urbanization, technological advancements, changes in society and work, and climate change. In lighter efforts of prediction, one can point to changes that have already occurred as an early indicator of where things could be headed, such as, for example, changes in staying in touch and in forming relationships and communities.

Future trends in and implications for education