Corporate training programmes are increasingly adopting XR (Extended Reality). XR—which is a collective term for VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), and MR (Mixed Reality)—fits the actual cycle of human knowledge acquisition.
Let’s rewind a few decades.
In 1984, American educational theorist David Kolb publicized his unified theory on how humans learn from their experiences. He outlined his observations into a 4-stage framework he named Kolb’s Learning Cycle:
XR fits seamlessly into all 4 stages:
Stage 1: Concrete Experience
Concrete experience is the learning experience a person undergoes. In a workplace context, it means your real-world exposure to a new problem—one that demands you to learn new information or build a new skill.
XR helps you give your workers the hands-on training, which is the best method to have the concrete experience Kolb’s talking about. You can let your workers practice the specific procedures they have to follow on their job.
Let’s assume you want to teach one of your workers to deal with fire emergencies. You can use VR to recreate the events that unfold during a fire emergency.
You now put Jordan, one of your new workers, inside the VR experience. Once Jordan puts on the headset, he hears the fire alarm, sees the red strobe lights, and witnesses the increase in smoke once they wear the VR headset.
Immediately, he grasps the gravity of the situation.
After listening to the instructions, Jordan understands he has to pick up the virtual fire extinguisher and follow the PASS technique to kill the fire. If Jordan successfully kills the fire in time, he passes. If not, he fails.
If Jordan were in a classroom lecture for fire safety, he would have seen the PASS technique as a sequence of images.
Stage 2: Reflective Observation
Imagine Jordan fails. The fire remains, even after he accurately uses the PASS technique.
Jordan later watches a replay of his VR session and identifies the mistake he made: he didn’t pick the right fire extinguisher. The fire he saw was a Class D fire and required a dry powder fire extinguisher. He had instead grabbed the standard ABC extinguisher.
This brings us to the second stage in the cycle, where the learner reflects on the learning experience they had.
Reflection is the opposite of passive learning. Because when you reflect, you think about the subject and expand your current perspective on it.
In Jordan’s case, his failure challenges his existing knowledge. His thinking models about fire and extinguishers don’t fit the learning experience he just had.
Stage 3: Abstract Conceptualization
The learner builds abstract models. They learn the higher-level rules; why and how things happen the way they do. They deepen their understanding of the subject.
To return to Jordan, he now understands:
There are different classes of fire.
How to identify each class of fire.
There are different types of extinguishers.
How to distinguish between these types.
Jordan now has a hypothesis of his own on what will work and what won’t.
Stage 4: Active Experimentation
By now, the learner has come up with various strategies to try out, based on the knowledge they’ve acquired. It’s in this stage that they test them.
So, the next time Jordan is in the same VR experience, he experiments. He picks the dry powder fire extinguisher, kills the fire, and passes the training.
XR training also allows your trainees to fail without consequences.
Suppose Jordan selects the dry powder extinguisher as planned, but the fire is of a different class from the one he saw first. The failure would restart the learning cycle. Jordan reflects further, deepens his knowledge, and eventually becomes good at dealing with fire emergencies.
