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Environment|Technology|Training
environment|technology|training

Digital education offers new experiential training opportunities

17th May 2019

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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Digital technologies are helping to improve education and leading to experiential training – a learning-by-doing approach that helps students to apply fundamental learning and merging experience and training, says Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (Lausanne Hospitality School) associate professor Dr Lohyd Terrier.

Virtual reality tools enable students to come into contact with a more dynamic representation of reality than a traditional case study would. Dynamic role play, or situational learning, could enhance teaching by requiring students to problem-solve in an immersive environment – one in which the consequences of each action could be tested on a trial-and-error basis.

“Teachers can either fight technology or use it to their advantage. These technologies foster a great deal of curiosity, and teachers can use them to get students’ attention and [get them] involved in classes. Explaining to a student what a production line looks like is one thing, but being able to show him or her – using a virtual reality headset – is an experience.”

M

aintaining students’ attention is another pedagogical goal. The immersive and experiential aspect of digital learning technologies could enable students to permanently encode information – they can think, see and test their ideas and knowledge immediately.

These new tools enable students to engage in highly specific situations because they do not come with the same time and cost constraints.

“The goal is to move closer to real-life work situations, which involve an emotional component that is often missing from traditional learning contexts.

“New technologies reduce the risk linked to errors in a real-life situation. Negative and positive consequences of virtual reality games enable users to test new strategies in a risk-free environment,” says Terrier.

Students have typically grown up with video games where tasks, challenges and immevdiate feedback are the rules. These rules are completed with rewards, competition, rankings and interaction with other gamers. Gamification is one of the best ways of attracting and retaining students’ attention in a real or virtual classroom, says EHL academic and student affairs director Ana-Maria Nogareda.

“Technologies offer opportunities to motivate and engage students, and to help them become active learners. Gamification is, however, also a challenge for the faculty members, since it is not just about games. “We have to know our students and their skills and we have to set the learning objectives [in a similar way we would in] a more traditional approach. The content has to be there – gamification and technology are just new ways to deliver it,” she says.

However, while new technologies seem to offer a variety of advantages, it would be unwise to see them as a cure-all.

The first problem is that immersion could significantly reduce interaction between individuals, particularly between students. Interacting with another human being is more enriching than interacting with an avatar. Student-teacher interaction must be maintained at all costs, says Terrier.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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