- A health simulation company offers computer simulations to help educate college students about substance use and sexual misconduct prevention.
- The School of Nursing has introduced UNLV’s Poverty Simulation, an interprofessional education exercise to help students from Nursing, Medicine, and Dental Medicine understand the challenges of poverty and the resources and barriers connected with community services.
- Students at the Michigan Tech Research Institute built an app simulation to enable scientists and engineers to measure hydraulic conductivity while simultaneously recording their data with ease and efficiency.
Examples like these show the growing importance of simulation-based learning in the EdTech world. 2020 was all about settling and getting used to the remote learning model. As online education and remote or hybrid workplace training continue to be the reality for most, simulation-based learning will find more acceptance.
Simulation-based learning offers learners a wide range of opportunities to deep dive into complex topics and practice skills. Let’s see how simulation has evolved over the years.
History of Simulation
Simulation training has been around for a very long time. Perhaps, the earliest application can be traced back to WWII when mathematicians John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam used newly developed computing techniques to model nuclear detonation for weapon design. Post this, the aviation industry completed aviation training in 1910 with the release of the first flight simulator.
Other industries soon followed. In the field of anesthesia in the late 1960s, full-body mannequin simulators were introduced based on work done by Denson and Abrahamson from the University of Southern California. From the 1970s, we began to see several computer-generated simulators.
Today, we’ve 3-D landscapes with the precise scale of landscapes in the real world. Simulation training has now expanded to a range of industries like healthcare, military, law enforcement, transportation, and more. But as we saw from the examples mentioned at the start, the recent strides of simulations in EdTech look most promising.
Let’s see how simulations are revolutionizing the EdTech space with several benefits for the learners.
8 Benefits of Simulations-based Learning
1. Practical learning: How many times have we heard the stuff – “Practical is always better than theory”? And there is merit to that. When your learners are aiming to be leaders in the business, simulations are one thing that can give them practical experience in the real world and prepare well. For instance, medical students can learn to perform operations and know human anatomy better through 3D simulations. Similarly, business school students would learn about running a business better with a simulation that can teach them to develop new products, market them, sell, and service them.
2. Instant feedback: The biggest advantage of simulations is real-time and prompt feedback. Trainers can provide constructive feedback, which offers learners opportunities to improve their skills. They can also try new, alternative skills or methods to improve old methods.
3. Collaborative skills: Perhaps, the single biggest benefit of simulation-based learning is seamless collaboration. Simulations introduce learners to several real-life scenarios, which require some cooperation between the participants. When simulated training solutions are implemented, learners often work with each other, which helps improve their teamwork abilities.
4. Retention aspect: Simulations make learning fun, which aids a lot when it comes to retention. Simulation-based learning programs equip learners to understand the actions they can take in a situation, which will, in turn, help them retain the concepts better. It also sort of validates the results of training and makes it effective.
5. Risk management: Simulation-based learning helps in risk management. Learners can be trained on the required concepts, and a business can test the efficacy and performance of the solution or product to learn what is working and what isn’t. this helps in risk management to a great extent.
6. Cost-effective: A simulation-based learning environment is always cost-effective compared to the real world. There are no travel or other admin costs involved in such an environment or in a remote setting to train the learners. Even the time and expenses are reduced significantly with improved retention and hands-on methods.
7. Multiple users: Of course, simulation-based learning supports multiple learners at one go; there’s no cap on the number of participants in the training, unlike a physical set-up.
8. Optimum resource utilization: Simulations can help in the management of resource utilization. Lesser resources are required to run a simulation compared to physical training sessions.
Simulations in EdTech – the Future is Bright
In today’s connected world, simulations can bridge the gap between structured training and real-life experiences. But creating simulations that stay true to the learning goals and are effective as well require expertise.
An experienced eLearning content development partner like Liqvid can help you design effective simulations with our end-to-end offerings. We have our own software development kit (SDK) consisting of several simulations templates that allow us to do rapid prototyping and development.
Our learning simulations are the preferred choice for global organizations with robust content authoring, LMS integration, and analytics. Contact us today to see how we can create interactive simulations for you.