Leveraging Virtual Reality to Create Immersive Learning for Government, Aerospace, and Defense

The Challenge: Condensing a Curriculum

A branch of the military had the challenge of condensing an existing eight-day, instructor-led training (ILT) course about aircraft maintenance scheduling into a more interactive five-day, immersive training program. The main learning goal was to enhance the quality of the learning experience while reducing seat time. The existing course was designed for maintenance leaders to learn the skills necessary to run a full maintenance schedule of a base.

This military branch worked with an emerging immersive VR software company over a three-year period with multiple successful pilot tests and projects. While the immersive VR training company had technical capabilities to build VR simulations, they sought out The Judge Group’s expertise to provide advanced learning capabilities to apply detailed learning methodologies into the immersive experiences.

The Solution: A Two-Part Approach

Judge partnered with the immersive VR company to initiate a two-part approach to restructure the existing training. Part one included a learning analysis of the current curriculum and a proposed program redesign. This design work occurred over a think tank workshop between Judge, the military branch, and the VR training company. This workshop leveraged the military knowledge, VR design skills, and learning best practices to determine the key training content to adapt existing training to an immersive VR training platform that focuses on increasing engagement, skills training, and speed to on-the-job proficiency.

The ongoing, second part of this approach involved an agile development process that moved from storyboarding to rapid prototyping and then a feedback loop. This flexible approach allowed the military branch experts to see feedback implementation in real time and continuously adjust to the learner’s needs. These feedback loops also gave the immersive VR training company’s product team time to customize the platform to meet the learner needs.

The Results: Strong Early Success with More VR Experiences Coming

This two-part approach has been successful in accelerating speed to market of learning products with the highest interactivity seen yet in these VR immersive experiences. The first wave of training for the 18-month project with the military branch has been tested and is currently available. The data coming from the VR experiences shows massive increases in interactivity and provides the instructors with data on what parts of the training should be retaught or further stressed. Getting valuable training into the hands of the military branch servicepeople is the overall goal, and with the partnership of the military branch, Judge, and the immersive VR training company, an efficient and successful process has been developed for long-term success.