California Community Colleges Aims to Hack Adult Learning Through Immersive VR Lab

Please enjoy my keynote from the January 25, 2019, launch of the Immersive Learning Lab at the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD). The audience comprised of 80 faculty, administrators and employers.

Thank you for inviting me to celebrate the launch of LACCD’s Immersive Learning Lab.

My name is Van Ton-Quinlivan, Executive Vice Chancellor of Workforce and Digital Futures of the California Community Colleges. It has been my honor to lead the transformation of the workforce mission of our 115 colleges from an afterthought to a public policy priority. In addition to regrowing public investment over the last seven years in career education (CTE) from $100 million to over $1 billion, I have been fortunate to shepherd greater experimentation, collaboration and innovation across the largest system of higher education in the nation.

Let me give you give you an example of one area of experimentation. It was in the area of soft skills, also referred to as power skills, employability skills, day one skills, 21st century skills, or human+ skills. They come by many names and examples including critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, etc. In the future of work, soft skills will be the least prone to automation.

So, I seeded three experiments to ensure our students left with more of these skills. The first was High Touch Health Care, now at 10 of our community colleges. Hospitals loved them so much that they asked our colleges to use the curriculum on existing employees. The second was cccMaker to connect 26 of our community colleges to the Maker movement, known as an alternate environment for fostering critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication (the 4 Cs) that lead to innovation. Much innovation comes from experimentation, where you have the ability to try, fail, try again, fail again, and so on until it works; Makerspaces create the environment for trial and error. The third was our New World of Work 21st Century Skills, now at 60 community colleges integrated across a variety of disciplines as well as taught as stand alone workshops. Apple reviewed the ten industry-advised skills in the New World of Work and exclaimed that they were exactly what they hired for and valued. For the first time, ten Apple Retail stores partnered with 10 community colleges offering retail management certificates, providing students a capstone experience and a recruiting URL.

I am bullish on immersive VR/XR because there is the potential to not only accelerate the development of technical skills (a.k.a., hard skills) but also to practice soft skills in ways unbound by place. Through immersive experiences, can students become more culturally appropriate when in the workplace? perform better under pressure? apply their learning in an integrated manner? act as part of a team to complete an assignment?

Borrowing language from the Maker movement, there is the potential to hack the brain and accelerate leaning — but we must experiment to understand how, under what conditions, and for whom the technologies can work. Can I, for example, a 50 year old Asian female learn coding faster if I entered the virtual space as a 15 year old teenage version of myself? Could the comforts of the virtual environment make it easier for a 50 year old Latino or white head of household to pick up new skills as AI automates away more and more of his/er job?

VR is not just for the young. Think about its application for adults.

I learned some statistics in a visit with Microsoft:

• Wake Forest University found that students who learned on virtual cadavers, as compared to those who practiced on real ones, had 60% less prep time. This meant the time could be repurposed for other practice or to learn something new.
• Other studies show a 22% increase in student retention.

The future of work requires us to work with the machines or within the machines (virtually). Machines get their upgrades all the time. Just think how often your iPhone or Android has gotten an automatic upgrade.

We humans need to think about education/training more akin to getting booster shots, and not as a one-time inoculation. Immersive VR offers a new tool for delivering these booster shots in ways potentially comfortable for adults who must keep up their skills.

Congratulations to the Los Angeles Community College District for establishing the beachhead for the system in experimenting with the use of these tools for the purpose of accelerating and deepening learning.