The virtual reality landscape is shifting rapidly as the main barriers to implementation—cost and content—are lowered. Investing in VR for learning is on the verge of being very affordable, but do you need it? The answer to that question depends on what you're trying to teach, and an evaluation of your alternatives. Convincing your leadership to invest in virtual reality can be challenging unless you can speak to its impact on organizational outcomes. How do you know you're getting your learning bang for the buck?

Creating an exciting experience in the VR headset is only part of the solution. How do you ensure that it’s instructionally effective? The ability to produce artificial environments that are believable enables us to produce an authentic context well beyond anything we’ve ever achieved in eLearning. We can produce fully immersive experiences that feel like real life, both in the environment the user experiences and the tasks that they must perform. With an effective ID framework, we can elevate human performance to produce true behavioral change. These aspirations are vitally important in subject matter that requires human interaction, empathy, and decision-making–topics such as sexual harassment, customer service, and negotiations, to name a few. These solutions are possible through a balanced application of instructional design and game design.

Oftentimes we present the learner with content they need to use for a job within the classroom setting. This may work for some, but others may forget what they have learned once they are on the job. Why not access what the learner is seeing in the moment and provide additional context or information that would enable them in the moment? End users may have to wait for a specialized technician, when instead we could use AR tools that could walk users through some initial trouble shooting steps for what they are currently seeing in the moment.

How does the largest employer on the planet, Walmart, attract and develop a new generation of managers who have spent more time playing games than they have in the classroom? How does pharmaceutical industry leader Novartis quickly train hundreds of people on best practice production and aseptic procedures for a new leukemia treatment, where mistakes have life and death consequences? How does Fortune 200 healthcare leader DaVita train a global organization to see the world through the customer's eyes?

Learner expectations continue to rise as engaging AR experiences from the marketing world set a new standard. With many companies experimenting with AR for learning, the reputational risk from failed learning initiatives can be high. So why not reapply proven success from large-budget industries that also use AR to change behavior? Why not learn from the success and failures from the marketers and others who have been experimenting with this technology and testing how to use it most effectively?

As a small department at Ally Insurance, it would be easy to rely on the old standby of instructor-led classroom facilitation for all topics— especially the boring ones. But we know that instructor-led classroom facilitation is not always the best, most efficient, or even most innovative way to communicate content to learners. What if a small but mighty department could create and implement a whole new way to learn and retain information?  What if they could quickly be the leader in L&D for their entire company with this new way of learning? And what if that new way was radically fun and techy?

There's an explosion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality applications in corporate training, and some of these training programs need facilitator support. What's the facilitator role in VR, AR, & MR training? And what skills do facilitators need in order to be effective in the VR/MR/AR classroom? Whether it's a facilitator guiding participants through a fully-immersive simulation, using mixed-reality applications in a learning event, or simply guiding people through a blended learning program with VR components, we have to address the new and updated skills needed for effective facilitation in these environments. Facilitators need to figure out which traditional classroom facilitation skills apply, and which ones don't.