Professional Development & Micro-Certification Course
Duration: 4-6 Hours
Mode: Self-Paced + Live Training
Certification: VictoryXR Spatial Learning Micro-Certificate
Please Note: As pictured below, this Course is split up into 3 sections, and you can jump ahead by clicking on the section title headings:
Exploring how VR enhances engagement, gamification, knowledge retention, and critical thinking through research-backed principles like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Dale’s Cone of Experience.
A step-by-step guide to setting up VXRLabs, onboarding users, managing headsets, licenses, and ensuring a seamless technical integration for educators and students.
Hands-on training, curriculum planning, in-headset activities, and final lesson plan & rubric submission to earn the VictoryXR Micro-Certificate.
Section 1: The Power of Spatial Learning
Exploring how VR enhances engagement, gamification, knowledge retention, and critical thinking through research-backed principles like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Dale’s Cone of Experience.
Table of Contents
VictoryXR: Who We Are & What We Do
VictoryXR’s immersive learning platforms, VXRLabs and the VXR AI Build-to-Learn Studio, are two of the most advanced immersive learning platforms in the world, and include the following features.
Designed for Campus Wide Learning: VXRLabs is pursuing a broad approach to immersive educational tools so that the major curriculum disciplines all have deep content available to them. VXRLabs is a one-stop solution for the entire institution, rather than a niche product for one college or discipline.
Multiplayer (Synchronous) and Single Player (Asynchronous) Learning: The learning environment is both synchronous (multiplayer) and asynchronous (single-player). This means that a school/teacher can host an entire class in a virtual reality lab, or assign students to engage in independent study.
Simulations and Creator Spaces: VXRLabs features cost-effective, safe, and immersive simulations in a wide variety of subject matter, including Chemistry, History, Literature & Language, Math, Biology, and more. Transform every lesson into an unforgettable adventure and create a lifelike experience for learning. The flexibility you have with VXRLabs is unique, making it easy to cover cross-curricular and multi-disciplinary teaching practices with ease. For example, students can conduct chemistry or biology experiments, explore themes of literature, understand mathematical use cases, practice forensics and journalism, complete career exploration activities in fields like robotics, agricultural science, or carpentry, and more, all within one application. With Creator Spaces, users can choose a virtual “classroom” or start from scratch in our Creator Space Sandbox. With access to a huge library of spawnable objects, a 3D pen, sticky notes, media file sharing, and more, unleash creativity, refine skills, and bring visions to life.
Conversational AI: Conversational AI experiences can be used to meet with AI patients, historical figures, business executives, patients, tutors and teaching assistants, and more. Conversational AI avatars are able to have multi-student conversations, rather than a conversation with a single person. This means a nursing class can interview an AI patient who is having chest pains, rather than limiting it to one person in the room asking the questions. Additionally, instructors can create their own AI lessons using the DIY Dashboard, integrating scripted lectures, 3D spawnables, assessments, media, and more into an immersive AI lesson.
Professional Development: VXRLabs includes Professional Development that is designed for teachers, by teachers. Created by our Education team, our PD content emphasizes the importance of, and history behind, spatial learning, based on the most up-to-date educational research and pedagogical best practices.
Host Controls: VR host controls in VXRLabs provide teachers with powerful tools such as spatial volume management, customizable student privileges, and group teleportation, creating an efficient and controlled virtual classroom environment.
Student Metrics: Our Activity Logs are an itemized receipt of student progress in-headset. Instructors can create their own class rosters, no student data required, and then follow each student’s progress in VR with metrics that are generated while they complete assigned simulations and experiences.
Streamlined Learning Management System: VXR Nexus delivers our version of a learning management system, created specifically for use in spatial education. Nexus allows teachers to manage classes and student accounts, complete professional development, track metrics, and build/assign their own curriculum.
Scalable and Infinitely Expandable: VXRLabs is infinitely expandable without creating additional resource lag. Existing content is created by VictoryXR, but additional content, lesson plans and rubrics, are coming soon from creators across the globe.
Memorable & Measurable
Professional Development Video 1 (0:39)
Professional Development Video 2 (0:55)
VXRLabs, our immersive learning application that features a World of Simulators, focuses on providing a MEMORABLE experience, that is simultaneously MEASURABLE, ensuring that students are learning and progressing while using the application, and that instructors have a way to observe student activities and success while in virtual reality.
Upgrading Education
Professional Development Video 3 (1:07)
Professional Development Video 4 (1:20)
Virtual reality is a unique learning solution because it can allow students to get hands-on with activities that would normally be…
- Too Expensive
- Too Dangerous
- Too Difficult
- Impossible
…to replicate in real life.
While conducting these activities in VR, it’s important that an instructor can track the learner’s progression and success rate – which is where our Activity Logs come into play.
Problems for Educators...
- Measuring performance can be subjective
- How do we know what a student is doing in headset? Or an asynchronous experience?
- Is my student’s data safe?
- How do we know it’s working?
Solved by Educators...
- Redefining what we know about pedagogy
- Our Activity Logs are an itemized receipt of your student’s experience.
- It sure is, because we don’t collect any of it.
- Become an expert in observational analysis
Gamification with VR
Professional Development Video 5 (1:07)
Professional Development Video 4 (1:13)
Gamification is a proven way to make students enjoy the learning process, incorporating “play” into the educational experience – no matter what age or grade level – can keep students engaged and help them retain information.
So, How Do We Define Gamification?
“As nit-picky as this all may sound, the consensus is an important thing. If we’re all working from the same base definition, then we’re able to have better conversations and drive deeper understanding.
Hence, here at Growth Engineering, we define gamification as “the application of gaming mechanics to non-gaming environments to make difficult tasks more palatable.”
What we mean by this definition is that gaming mechanics – experience points, levels, leader boards, rewards – help you to make boring tasks more fun. Instead of dragging your heels and putting off whatever it is you need to do, gamification engages you! You’ll jump in, get it done and win that high score!
Gamification leverages our desires for status, achievement, competition and to be part of an inclusive social community to increase engagement.
Many gamification models reward the user for completing the desired task and a leader board is then utilized so they strive for further improvement. These elements result in a gamification platform with high levels of engagement.”
Excerpt From the Article: Growth Engineering: How Do We Define Gamification
How Does Higher Education Get in the Game?
“The bad news here is that educational institutions are notoriously slow to change. The good news is that they may not be able to hold back a wave of that is about to crest and wash their resistance away.
Gaming has become an increasingly important part of culture and its spread into public education means that students entering college in the next several years are going to have an expectation that gaming will be a part of the college curriculum.
If higher education does not adapt to meet this demand, it may find itself in even deeper trouble than it already is as potential students seek alternative paths to have their interests satisfied. If an initiative such as the MacArthur Foundation’s digital badges takes hold, game-based learning may become an acceptable, even accredited, alternative path to higher education.
If that happens, the dams will burst and the most significant changes in education since the Industrial Revolution will sweep away previous notions of what learning looked like.”
Excerpt from the Article: Gonzaga Edu: How Does Higher Ed Get in the Game?
The Science of Learning
How Video Games Can Level Up the Way You Learn | Kris Alexander | TED (12:28)
Professional Development Video 7 (0:30)
In the TED Talk below, Dr. Kris Alexander highlights how video games can revolutionize education by enhancing engagement, motivation, and learning retention. He shares a personal experience of overcoming cognitive overload in a traditional lecture by playing video games, demonstrating that interactive engagement improves focus rather than hindering it. Video games naturally incorporate clear objectives, real-time feedback, and progress tracking, elements often missing in traditional education but essential for student success.
This concept directly aligns with VictoryXR’s mission, reinforcing why spatial learning and gamified VR experiences are effective in modern education. By integrating game-based mechanics, adaptive learning, and interactive VR environments, educators can create engaging, goal-oriented instruction that bridges the gap between learning and real-world application. This research-backed approach ensures that students remain motivated, immersed, and better prepared for their future careers.
Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy
Professional Development Video 8 (1:25)
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Measurable Objectives
Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [6/29/23] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.
Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience
Professional Development Video 9 (2:10)
Lesson Types
Dale’s Cone of Experience
Lee, S. J., & Reeves, T. C. (2007). Edgar Dale: A significant contributor to the field of educational technology. Educational Technology, 47(6), 56. Retrieved [6/30/23] from https://pressbooks.pub/lidtfoundations/chapter/edgar-dale-and-the-cone-of-experience/
Why Spatial Learning is the Solution
Spatial learning and VR align with Dale’s Cone of Experience and Bloom’s Taxonomy to maximize knowledge retention and acquisition. Traditional learning methods, such as text-based or symbolic experiences, result in surface-level learning and short-term retention. In contrast, immersive, student-led experiences—such as VR simulations, hands-on activities, and discovery-based learning—engage students at the highest levels of critical thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge application.
By allowing learners to design, construct, investigate, and interact in a virtual environment, VR transforms education into a purposeful experience, reinforcing both higher-order thinking skills and long-term retention. This student-centered, experiential approach ensures deeper learning and better real-world skill transfer, making VR an ideal solution for modern education.
Lesson Types
Knowledge Retention
Dale’s Cone of Experience
Measurable Objectives
Knowledge Acquisition
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Highest Order Thinking Skills
Lowest Order Thinking Skills
Going Back to Basics
Professional Development Video 10 (0:45)
Observation & Documentation
Professional Development Video 11 (1:08)
Our Activity Log will do this one for you!
At the end of a student’s experience in headset, an itemized inventory of their activity in each module will be processed back to their instructor of record.
Interpretation
As instructors ourselves, the education team at VictoryXR implores you to look hard at each student’s Activity Log and consider every possible implication of these events.
In traditional assessments, if a student makes 15 attempts to complete an experiment and are not successful, that would automatically take points off of their final “score”. In performance assessment, every non-success is just as informative as a success when demonstrating what students need to know! By making the interpretation of data a necessary step, performance assessments often provide the why and teachers can use that data to make informed decisions regarding next steps for each individual student.
Implementation
Once you have interpreted the events of your student’s activity log, you can use that anecdotal data to make informed decisions.
If it takes Student A more than 15 tries to successfully complete their chemistry experiment, the “what happened?” is far less significant than the “why did that happen?”
How We Know it Works
To showcase the value of spatial education, we partnered with Baton Global to conduct research to develop a more robust understanding of virtual reality (VR) as it pertains to teaching and learning in higher education, with a specific focus on universities using VictoryXR’s platforms. The research sought to illuminate how these technologies empower instructors as they design and deliver effective learning experiences over the length of a course, and how well the technologies deliver immersive student experiences that learners desire and feel support their learning. Our findings strongly advocate for integrating spatial education into any learning environment, and as frequently as possible.
Research Design
Key Findings - Instructors
Key Findings - Students
Analysis on Findings
Considering the results and major findings in context provides VictoryXR and its higher education partners and collaborators a number of important takeaways that can inform future use of VR, as well as product development and successful integration:
