Virtual Reality Learning Analytics With xAPI

Virtual reality training is an easily identified answer when it comes to situations where in-person training is too dangerous, too costly, or the environment is difficult to replicate — things like factories, fire safety, or emergency management. But there are many other situations where virtual reality learning has strong advantages:

• When situational awareness is critical
• When mistakes would be costly and wasteful
• When personal interactions are the key to positive outcomes

By incorporating VR into training programs in creative ways in areas like onboarding, retention, soft skill development, process improvement, and recruiting, organizations have seen dramatic improvements in the overall experience for learners, employees, and leads alike.

Once you get past the myth that "VR is only for big dangerous and expensive training," and discover that the technology needed to deliver VR training has become very accessible, there are two big questions that most people ask when they start to consider how they would incorporate VR into their learning and training programs:

• How are we going to make and distribute our own VR content?
• How are we going to demonstrate the effectiveness of our VR training?

When Trivantis and Yet Analytics partnered up to present at this year's Realities360 conference, the answer to the first question was obvious — CenarioVR — and the answer to the second is a big part of what we've been collaborating on over the last several months.

CenarioVR is an all-inclusive VR platform that allows content authors to create, edit, publish, and analyze their own VR training content using 360 videos. With built-in xAPI analytics at every answer, click, and interaction, content authors are able to automatically collect data about their learners' experience and quickly analyze the results in real-time dashboards.

From the very beginning we knew that a critical aspect of making the shift from VR as an occasional part of the instructional designer's toolkit to an immersive and frequent part of the learners' experience, it had to be easy not only to make, create, and deliver VR content, but it had to be just as easy to demonstrate its effectiveness.