Bored with online courses?

Ever had the experience of watching the clock during an online course, checking every other minute to see what percentage of the course is remaining? How about your eyes getting tired of reading slide after slide, or having to rewind instructional videos multiple times because you weren’t interested the first time, or the second, or the third? If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a few many experiences of taking an online course, while at the same time multitasking to do other things to break up the monotony. What all of these experiences have in common is a lack of user engagement, based on antiquated technology that does not adequately provide some of the requisite components of behavioral skills training—lacking any semblance of roleplay and rehearsal, and providing limited opportunities for interaction or feedback aside from the occasional quiz. Enter COVID on the scene and the “temporary” hiatus from gathering indoors leading to many of us going exclusively online for continuing education has led to a critical point of being thoroughly dissatisfied with slide-based learning, video lectures, or other passive “learning” experiences. Add to that the experience of teaching online, frustratingly trying to devise interactions within an online user interface that seemed to reinforce passivity as opposed to active engagement, and the field of online behavior education seemed overripe for a paradigm shift. It was in this context that the dream of Behavior Skills Training in Virtual Reality was born.