Does Virtual Reality technology help university students learn?

When it comes to cool EdTech, nothing beats Virtual Reality tools in the classroom. The Western University of Health Sciences has a virtual dissection table where students can learn about anatomical functions by moving layers of virtual tissue to view more than 300 anatomical visualisations. At Lehigh University, the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning is teaching students and faculty to use two HTC VIVE VR systems so they can employ these emerging technologies in their future classrooms.VR is being hailed as a revolutionary tool, with up to 60 percent of US higher education institutions expected to use the technology by 2021. But new research by Cornell University serves as a caution that we shouldn’t be jumping onto the bandwagon too soon. Studying 172 Cornell undergraduates and their understanding of moon phases, the findings show there are no improved learning outcomes from using VR.For the study, researchers created three Moon phase activities for three groups of students: a traditional hands-on activity, a computer-based version, and a fully-featured VR version.