The way we engage with the world is changing. Everything is instant – from the news and media we consume, to the way we share and receive communications. Technology is completely ingrained in millennial culture and the generation that followed.
However, despite the ubiquity of technology for these generations, education and training has been slow to adopt new innovations and adapt to the changing culture of learning. Information is still being dispersed through low-tech innovation, legacy media, standard definition graphics and tedious 2D handouts. For a millennial, this kind of learning is torture – it’s uninspiring, unengaging and dull.
Modern Distractions
Modern learners want to be engaged. A diet of snapchat stories, Tweets and 3 minute Facebook videos has created a generation unsuited to hours of text-based learning and rote memorisation. Therefore learning has to be mentally and emotionally engaging, interactive and modern.
However, modern technology can be distracting, especially to generations who are completely immersed in technology, so what better way to educate than to turn those distractions into learning opportunities?
Virtual Reality (VR)-based training content can help us move learning to immersive virtual worlds and autonomous environments to truly capture the attention of the digital generations.
Critical thinking
Part of the new way of learning for the digital generations is critical thinking and contextual application. Memorisation is outdated with the internet rendering the ability to recall facts and figures obsolete. Learners are now rewarded for their ability to think critically and apply their knowledge and thought-processes to problem solving.
Virtual reality learning environments can create and offer complex problems to solve and encourage the critical, adaptive way of thinking that pushes millennials to achieve more. In many ways, virtual and augmented reality is the ideal training tool for contextualised training that encourages exploration and innovation.
The Gaming Lifestyle
Millennials are a mission oriented video-game generation so gamification encourages achievement and attainment. Games allow the players to learn rules, achieve targets and complete side missions all built in to an overarching story which is pretty much like any ordinary workplace!
Self-achievement is a driving force for millennials and all aspects of modern games are to move the players forward. Virtual reality and gamification of eLearning creates real-time feedback and data that helps with course correction and motivates learning to adapt and improve just like perfecting moves and processes in video games – without doing so you can’t move forward so when you perfect it you feel a sense of achievement.
It’s time to embrace the technology in learning and truly unleash the potential of an innovative, intuitive and intelligent generation that is so often underestimated because the world refuses to catch up with them.