Seeking Integrity in VR Educational Research 3: It keeps on happening
It keeps on happening If I were you, by now, I’d be asking, “Heather, why are you doing this?…
Month: August 2023
Seeking Integrity In VR Educational Research 2: PwC VR for Soft Skills
Credit: Me and Midjourney
My first article in this series garnered so much attention! But many folks tried to pass me Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner’s Truth or Truthiness? Analysing a VR Study Using Gorard’s Sieve article on the PwC report entitled “The effectiveness of virtual reality soft skills training in the enterprise: a study” and all of its associated webpages like this one. I was like, I know! Mirjam & Paul wrote their article 2020 and I wrote about it in 2021. What’s cool is that separately, we both came to the same conclusions. That’s a good sign for our conclusions!
Short version: we both cast strong doubt on any conclusions.
Still, I realize the world does not revolve around me (sigh!). Some folks might have missed my long stream-of-consciousnesses article about the PwC report. I decided that the second article in this series should be an abbreviated and updated critique. Bear in mind that to reach the LinkedIn audience, I have to leave much nuance by the side of the road. If you have questions, just ask!
As Mario says “Here we go!”
What is Said About The Report
This infographic summarizes the dominant conclusions:
- 275% more confident to act on what they learned after training
- 4x faster than classroom training on average
- 4x more focused than e-learners
- 3.75x more emotionally connected to the content than classroom learners.
Capture of how the PwC report is being talked about on LinkedIn.
A few more quotes, thanks to Google and a search on “VR 4x faster.” What seems to be a pattern about all of these results?
What do these Google results have in common?
They are all companies that sell some sort of VR product or service.
Because I was curious, I checked out that vrowl dot io link (“Virtual Reality training is not effective”) just to see if it was presenting an alternate opinion. It’s a strawman argument; it puts up “not really real” protests against VR for learning and then explains them away. I’m telling ya, Beware the VR Strawman.
What the Report Says
Eckert, D., & Mower, A. (2020). The effectiveness of virtual reality soft skills training in the enterprise: a study. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/technology/emerging-technology/assets/pwc-understanding-the-effectiveness-of-soft-skills-training-in-the-enterprise-a-study.pdf
Let’s ask Google Scholar what it thinks. It’s coming up with 11 cites. That’s not much at all. But as I showed above, the money shot is on the Internet, not in academic articles.
Truly, the 4x faster learning quote is the runaway train of this report.