Published on May 23rd, 2017 | by Guest

Pros and Cons of using VR in the Classrooms

Virtual reality is one of the fascinating wonders that the technology has produced for us. At first, the VR was only using as the source of entertainment. Later on, we started using it in other sectors of life including education.

Since the schools and colleges started using the VR headgears in their classrooms, a new dimension of education opened. VR is not only facilitating the students but also helping the students in better learning. However, there is another mindset too which doesn’t think that VR is useful for the education and still believe that the old traditional educational method should be continued. Neither of these school of thoughts can be rejected because they both have their grounds of this claim which we are going to be discussed in details simultaneously in the following lines.

Pros:

1. Provide Visualization of every topic:

One of the main benefits of VR technology is that it provides you with the excellent visualization of every topic of the textbook. The VR technology let the students explore the things visually and from an alternate dimension. By wearing the VR headset, you can see what you are listening from your teacher which helps you in keeping the topic remembered for a long time. Whereas, the traditional teaching method was failed to give us such type of visualization that can boost our tendency of remembering the things.

2. Creates the interest of students:

It doesn’t matter if you are a student or the college pass out. VR headgears always excite us. Then how it is possible that it fail to create the interest in students towards their education. Students are loving watching all the geography lessons instead of reading it from their textbooks. This is a huge difference in reading the area of the Pacific Ocean and watching the Pacific Ocean in 3D from your eyes. Students are feeling more motivated to learn with this technology which is good for global educational goals.

3. Increasing the Student’s engagements:

It is not easy for the teachers to create a strong engagement within the class. But with the VR technology, students are not only participating in the classroom activities but also showing the motivation to learn more and more by using this technology. This is a good sign because classroom engagement is one of the first steps towards active learning.

4. It doesn’t make them feel they are in the classroom:

Being a student, we all hate to stay in the classroom throughout the day. But now there is no such thing. The scenario has changed due to the VR headgears which can make you feel like sitting at the top of the Himalayas while you are only sitting only on your school bench. This is why students are enjoying their learning and spending more time in the classrooms instead of bunking the lectures and hanging out with the friends outside of the classroom.

Cons:

1. Disconnecting us with humans:

VR is maybe helpful in engaging the students, but it is only engaging them with the machines. Engaging the students with the machine means that students are entirely dependent on the machine and he will face problems while asking help from their teachers which can be a huge disadvantage as a student. That is why the use of VR in the classrooms is damaging the relationships between students and overall human interactions.

2. No scope of Flexibility:

If you are learning something visually, that doesn’t mean you are going to understand each and everything out of it. While having the lecture, the student have this liberty to do cross questioning with the teacher and try to take as many of his experience as possible. Moreover, the video that plays in the VR headgear is made to follow a certain pattern which means the students cannot learn anything else except the content of the video. This is killing all the purpose of having the classroom learning and making the students learn with the other students. Moreover, the student will get independent on his studies which can neither be analyze nor supervised by the teachers.

3. Disturbs the academic schedule:

Just like any other programmed software or tech device, things can go wrong with the VR headgears too. This is one of the major drawbacks of over-relying on the electronic devices. When things go wrong with either the videos or the VR headgears, the learning activity of the students also stopped until the problem get fixed. This creates disturbance in the academic schedule and also inconvenient for the learning process because these problems break the learning momentum which is not good for the students. For example, if a student have an exam next day and his or her VR headgear goes boom, then how he will study and pass the exam. This is not only a hypothetical exam but a reality because it has become one of the common excuses that the students are coming up with for their failure in the exam. Moreover, getting your VR headgear fixed or buying a new one is not an easy thing because these devices are too expensive for a common man.

4. Making the education needlessly more expensive:

Education especially the higher education is already far from the reach of the middle class. A kid from the middle-class family needs to take educational fund or loans to get admission in any college and get the degree to make his future bright. In such financial crisis conditions, how can the same student afford to buy the expensive tech devices like VR headgears? Not on the individual level, this issue is also affecting the greater cause. Those organizations who are trying to spread education worldwide will struggle too because they have to spend billions of dollars extra on these techs. Moreover, the modern education will remain limited to the rich ones because only they can afford these expensive tech devices. Though, the poor will always get deprived of it which will create the classifications in the world education system which is important to obsolete to create an equal educational consensus.

Author Bio:

Joe Pirest is a Master in Educational Sciences and a professional blogger on the world educational scenarios. He is also running his own online academic writing company which also gives dissertation help to the students in need.

Tags: classrooms, cons, pros, virtual reality, vr