TECHNOLOGY
Challenges & opportunities However, VR technology is not without its challenges. A central consideration is the cost. “Buying the headsets might cost about £150 at this stage, but that isn’t anywhere near the cost of deployment,” Finn conceded. “You’ll want to build an environment and regularly use it, so there is the cost of subscriptions and software updates, alongside the cost of having people to prepare and clean them each time.” The Strathclyde director has identified other potential problems. “It’s both a plus and minus point, but you can’t do anything else while you’re wearing a VR headset. On the one hand, this is great because people don’t get distracted by their phones or by something else. However, the downside is that people find it difficult to take notes and remember things.” The use of VR remains a work in progress at Strathclyde, but one with huge potential. “We find that it reduces barriers and enables students to experiment and be creative,” surmised Finn. Other areas of use and interest at Strathclyde run the gamut of the business school experience, from induction activities at the journey’s start to career services towards its end, via the learning experience in course units. “ We have people dancing together,” Finn declared in relation to helping cohort participants get to know each other, before moving on to opportunities within the programme proper. “We do some traditional presentation skills training, for which we bring in an actor and get students to deliver their work in class. Using VR, you can pretend you’re on a TED Talk stage in front of 1,000 people,” he suggested. In terms of helping students to boost their employability, meanwhile, a further attraction he is exploring is whether the technology can offer practice interviews or scenarios that feel “a bit more like a formal interview or assessment centre”. The Strathclyde director is also intrigued by the possibility of combining VR with AI. Referring to Meeno, a new AI-powered platform that asks you questions and uses your answers to offer relationship advice, he said: “I’m wondering if it would be viable to do something like this in an actual place and speak to an AI-generated presence rather than just typing your answers in.” Such musings bring us back to where we began, with AI as the potential star of the show in higher education’s future, but one that looks likely to be ably supported by a colourful cast of different technological characters.
BUILDING BLOCKS
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that VR’s propensity for immersion might offer a deeper and more realistic insight into different stakeholders than regular role-playing situations or case studies. To date, Strathclyde students have been tasked with further exploring the technology’s potential uses in industry. “We handed out VR headsets to a series of supply chain students and gave them two weeks to provide examples of how they could be used in the industry,” explained Finn. “We framed it around the technology’s applications and the extent to which VR is useful for supply chain training.” The technology is also now set to be used to facilitate a factory tour for operations management students. As with simulations, the potential to engage students is clear. “Students were talking, sharing and creating things together with an intensity that I don’t think I’ve seen in the classroom and certainly not on a Zoom breakout,” Finn said of its introduction at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic had taken much of the school’s traditional in-person learning online.
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Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
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