Virtual-reality learning is the next big wave

Virtual reality is becoming reality – and it’s coming soon to an educational institution near you.

In his book Trends 2000, published almost 20 years ago, Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente laid the foundation for a trend line — InteractiveU, he called it — that only would fortify over a period of decades.

“Interactive, online learning will revolutionize education…” he wrote. Moreover, he forecast that “the growth of the home ed and InteractiveU trend will accelerate rapidly once tele-videophony or other comparable multimedia-interface technologies become available and affordable.”

As such, The Wall Street Journal reported March 10 that Yale University’s decision to develop a digital-learning program for a medical-science master’s degree was “the latest sign that online learning is gaining acceptance from the nation’s most prestigious institutions.”

Still, a larger trend line continues to be under-reported.

Those lifelike virtual card dealers in casinos across the globe are only the beginning of a powerful trend line that will see virtual instructors coming into your webinars leading lectures — and essentially conducting class.

As the Trends Research Institute predicted in its Top Trends for 2014: “In higher education circles, the long-held belief that digital learning has significant limitations will fade.” Our “digital learning’s golden era” trend anticipated that once the stigma melted among university elites, the flood gates would open.

The Wall Street Journal reported “it is a coming-of-age” for online education, said Lucas Swineford, executive director of Yale’s office of digital dissemination and online learning. “The stigma has certainly changed over the past five or six years. This is a Yale degree.”

In relatively short order, expect to see virtual-reality learning explode across a spectrum of educational institutions, disciplines and levels of schooling.

Now accepted as legitimate, and more affordable in an era of mammoth, growing and unmanageable college debt, digital learning will give birth to virtual reality learning.