Reimagining education and the effectiveness of Virtual Reality training

Education | April 11, 2016

Michael Bodekaer gave a great speech at TEDxCERN about the future of Education.

Michael Bodekaer is the founder of Labster which teaches life sciences through gamified education in immersive 3D virtual worlds and laboratories. Proven to significantly enhance student’s motivation, these pioneering teaching tools that are bringing a revolution to world ­class learning. He also founded Learn Technologies, a Swiss company focused on immersive Virtual Reality for learning and training simulations.

Here is the video:

The effectiveness of virtual reality training

Something really interesting we learn in this speech is that learning psychologist did a study with 160 students from Stanford University and Technical University in Denmark. They split the students into two groups, one group was only using the virtual laboratory simulations and the other group was only using traditional methods of learning. They had the exact same amount of time.

They gave the students a test before and after the experiment so they could clearly measure the learning impact of the students and what they found was a 76% increase in the learning effectiveness when using virtual laboratories over traditional teaching methods. The second part of this study investigated what the teachers impact was under learning. What they found was that when you combine the virtual laboratories with real teachers we saw a total 101% percent increase in the learning effectiveness. Which doubles the science teachers impact with the same amount of time spent.

Let us know in the comments what you are thinking about this experience!