This semester, Fordham University business professors are using virtual reality (VR) to build students’ professional skills by placing them in simulated workplaces. Students are immersed in these virtual simulations while their professors and classmates watch and critique them in real-time.
According to an article by the Washington Post, by leveraging VR, students are exposed to the soft skills that are necessary for their careers, but are difficult to teach in a traditional classroom setting, such as relationship building, networking, negotiation, and listening. While these skills have generally been taught through lectures and textbooks, VR has the potential to give them a practice run before ever setting foot in an actual office.
“When you have the headset on, it feels real, and that experience creates confidence.” said Professor Lyron Bentovim, course instructor and chief executive of Glimpse Group, the company behind the course’s technology. “Your brain actually assumes you’ve experienced the simulated environment, and it brings educational concepts to life for students. When they leave class, they don’t say ‘We learned about negotiating today’; they say ‘I negotiated today.’ or ‘I led a business meeting today.’”
The Glimpse Group also released Project Chimera, an immersive educational environment that allows them to engage with classes from outside of the classroom. Students participating remotely can wear a VR headset and sit in class as if they were physically present. They can communicate with other students and the professor via custom avatars all while being “present” for the lectures and classroom experience.
Virtual reality technology is being adopted more and more across educational institutions and studies show that VR can be a successful replacement for lab experiences. VR training, used in this way in classrooms, can provide students with an experience that they previously would have only gotten through time-consuming internships that vary in the type of work experience they provide. The VR environment that is being offered at Fordham offers consistent training to all students and provides an equally high-quality experience.
This same theory of consistency carries into the business world. VR can streamline employee training by providing consistent high-level training for employees in a controlled setting, resulting in less risk of expensive mistakes later on, such as with Talespin’s Runway platform.
