While Zoom and Google Meet have been the mainstay for online teaching for most schools across America, many students and families feel disengaged outside of school and are concerned about missing out on important and engaging experiences that come with in-person and hands-on learning in a classroom environment. But with the necessity of social distancing during this Covid-19 pandemic, new and innovative solutions to learning online are being discovered, leading the future of digital education. One of the biggest developments to come in this field of technology has been the development of XR—virtual and augmented reality—class courses. The world leader in this breakthrough is “VictoryXR Academy.”

“VictoryXR Academy” is an online school operated entirely on a virtual reality platform called “Engage” and has been designed to be compatible with almost any VR headset. The school’s mission is to make online learning as fun, interactive, and accessible as possible. To achieve this, “VictoryXR Academy” provides VR headsets to applicants who may not have access to virtual reality or PCs. “VictoryXR Academy” even allows students to keep the headsets as a way to allow them to continue to freely explore the potential capabilities that virtual reality can have as a new frontier for science education.

“We believe that we can change education in a positive way around the world,” according to the CEO and co-founder of “VictoryXR Academy” Steve Grubbs on the “XR for Business” podcast in 2019. 

“If you think about it, for decades – I used to serve in the Iowa legislature, and I was chairman of the Education Committee,” Grubbs explains, “and we spent a lot of time addressing, how do we improve education? And there were a lot of things we did on the input side, but at the end of the day, what we all know is that if students love to learn, they love what they’re learning – like all of us – then there’s no work in it; you just love to do it, and you immerse yourself in it.” 

Grubbs then goes on to say, “We believe that XR Technologies – VR and AR – are the solution to having students love what they’re learning. So we’re creating as much content as possible, aligned to standards, so that teachers can integrate it into their lesson plans, or parents can just simply pull it off the shelf and use it.”

The school is constantly developing new features and units for class curriculums spanning from K-12, to even college courses. To aid Grubbs in his mission, “VictoryXR Academy” has formed several partnerships with major, accredited universities, such as Oxford University.

One way these partnerships are improving the way we teach can be found in biology classes. According to the laws of some states, students are able to opt out of animal dissections, but there must be a viable alternative. To solve this issue, Grubbs partnered with Carolina Biological, the leading supplier of dissectible specimens for schools across the US, to develop anatomically accurate models of samples in virtual reality as an alternative for hands-on dissection.

“VictoryXR Academy” has also connected with internet celebrities to spread awareness of the growing alternative to online learning.  In one such case director of development Danny Coyle invited Twitch streamer, Youtuber, and animator Ross O’Donovan into “VictoryXR Academy” to give him and his girlfriend a full tour of what the virtual school had to offer.

As we are forced to stay and learn at home, new and exciting technologies like XR-learning are becoming the new reality. The future of what our innovation can do for society is limitless, and I cannot imagine what might come next in the field of recreational household technology and science.