While many colleges and universities offer online degrees, engineering and science programs have been slow in catching up with this mode of education delivery. One roadblock for implementing fully online engineering degrees in some areas, such as mechanical, chemical, or material sciences, is the requirement of laboratory hours. These laboratories require a high investment in development of infrastructure, and of course, these laboratories would be hard to replicate in the eLearning environment.

Many solutions exist that circumvent this obstacle, some are technological solutions, and others are more conventional. For example, some colleges contract external services with locations close to those students that need the practice. Some technological solutions are available, for example immersive technologies for eLearning.

Immersive technologies have been around for many years, catching the attention of researchers and entrepreneurs at different points in time. Eventually, technological limitations and costs (among other issues) discouraged development and the technology never matured. However, a few professionals stayed in the field until new discoveries and advances brought back attention to the technology.

The technologies for virtual reality (another term for immersive technologies) evolved in time, at a slow pace, to produce more portable devices such as the Oculus, which has been commercially available for some years. Sensors made significant advances during this time as well; they have reduced in size and cost. The software needed to run immersive technologies has grown in complexity, thanks in part to the availability of more powerful computers.

Not all immersive technologies require expensive equipment. For example, Minecraft can be played in an IPad or a PC, it requires no more than an Internet connection. These days, gaming consoles offer full simulation experiences thanks to the availability of games through cloud systems.

For years, movies portrayed systems where users could interact kinesthetically with applications, usually desktops with novel displays. This usually involved the movement of hands to start the applications. This became a reality when the Nintendo Wii game system came to market. Others followed Nintendo and developed similar systems. In the education sector, vendors offer similar technologies for educational applications.

The most recent trend in entertainment and education is to create simulated environments using immersive technologies. Due to the decrease in cost of devices and software, the use of virtual tools has seen an increase. Now schools and colleges can afford immersive technologies to make virtual laboratories or environments where students could practice what they are learning, and they use them for eLearning courses.

But how are immersive technologies helping education? It has found a use in K-12 education, but no studies have found a conclusive correlation between an improvement in learning and the use of the technology. Many vendors claim these applications make the classroom a better place to learn, and their promotional videos may try to support this claim. The research seems to point at the use of VR technologies as an aid to the curriculum, and educators need to check that these interactions are aligned with the learning objectives of your eLearning course.

What about higher education? Some fields of engineering have matured enough to serve as models for other fields. For example, computer programming and robotics seem to be making strides in the use of virtual technologies to advance education. An example of this is the robotics and programming courses offered in MOOCs such as eDX and Coursera.

Social interaction between multiple users seems to encourage learning among participants, this is an important affordance of the technology. These programs in higher education are taking advantage of this consequence of the virtual environment. This has been proven by many gaming systems that use the dynamics of teams of players to advance in the game. It seems virtual environments foster collaboration and sharing of knowledge when many players interact.

It may be argued that the success of immersive technologies lies on the lack of structure, those environments do not clearly define a problem. An instructor in the classroom usually develops case studies for students to work on, or students solve team-based projects in class. The solution to those problems or projects will have a structure already worked out by the instructor, who guides the students towards a conclusion. Problems have no structure in virtual environments, and participants can solve them with little information, and they could arrive at nonconventional solutions.

Another finding relates to communication and social interaction that would not happen in the classroom. Students tend to feel more compelled to offer their ideas in a virtual community than in a classroom setting.

If more online programs use eLearning with immersive technologies, and they keep reporting successful results in literature and media, it will be a matter of time before they find their way into other programs (research has been reported on the use of VR in medicine). These reports should include the effects of this technology in social collaboration, and how students perform with the freedom of working on problems that are not conventional, and for which little information is available to the participants.

Whether this technology affects the brain in a positive way is up for debate. Research has produced no data to support or deny this. The running argument against virtual reality relates to evolution, the brain took millions of years to evolve, these technologies have been around for a few decades only, it would be unreasonable to expect any changes in the brain in short an amount of time, especially since these technologies evolve rapidly, whereas our brains take a long time to change. Changes in the internal wiring of the brain are happening while we use these devices in those virtual environments. Learning is a change in behavior, and it is visible (for example, when you learn physics, you are tested, and learning would be apparent). But immersive technologies have yet to prove they achieve the same results or maybe different results. Many studies have not reached a conclusive outcome, at best they showed results that suggest VR technologies do improve sensorimotor skills, spatial navigation, and the instruction of certain types of subjects (science, language) but in regards to effective learning, the jury is still out there.

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