The ISTE 2016 educational conference held in late June, with over 16,000 in attendance hailing from 76 countries, is the largest ed-tech conference held in the U.S. One of the newest and most interesting arrivals at this year’s ed-tech expo hall was Mursion, a company that designs customized training simulations held in virtual space.
A Mursion Teacher Preparation Virtual Environment
A San-Francisco-based company with satellite office in Orlando, Mursion does not produce off-the-shelf content for virtual reality. Instead, they use their simulation engine to customize specific solutions for their customers. In my interview with Brentt Brown, Mursion’s Director of Business Strategy, he explained his company’s footprint in this way: “We focus on creating a virtual environment where professionals practice and rehearse fundamental interpersonal skills for high-stakes careers.” Here are a few examples showing how that actually works
In Education. Many of their customers asked them to develop virtual reality simulations enabling prospective teachers to practice classroom management (classroom discipline) skills. Others employ their engine to build VR simulations for rehearsing essential teaching techniques, such as how to more effectively use questions to elicit deeper student thinking.
In Hospitality. Best Western Resorts and Hotels recently used Mursion to train and provide performance assessment for their globally distributed workforce of more than 15,000 front desk staff, focusing on front-line customer service acumen conducted via live simulation role playing.
In Medicine. Another customer is using the Mursion simulation engine to help medical and hospital staff rehearse in a realistic VR environment the delivery of information to patients receiving unfortunate findings from recent diagnostic tests.
In Industry. Mursion helps clients create multi-avatar environments that enable trainees practice facilitating team meetings or manage interpersonal conflict that is impeding job performance
And there’s much more in the works. In the near future, Mursion will enable the creation of a simulation that populates a virtual classroom with student avatars with differing learning challenges, including language-diverse, ADHD-diagnosed, and autistic-spectrum students; a simulation that helps educators improve how they communicate with parents; and a simulation for autistic students that will help them practice their social skills.
A Mursion Educator Leadership Training Instance in a Virtual Environment
Using its modular and cost efficient simulation engine, Mursion offers their customers a cost/benefit ratio that appears noteworthy. According to Brown, “most simulations require three-hundred hours of design work to produce one hour of simulation for classroom delivery.” With the use of the Mursion development templates, however, “the cost of designing most simulations is less than $1000 (or about eight hours of development time).” Mursion is also aiming to organize a marketplace or clearinghouse of role-playing simulations (designed by current clients) to offer even more cost reduction to future customers.
Mursion exhibiting at ISTE 2016
Consistent with a trend I’ve been seeing across the education spectrum, Mursion is preparing for the immersive VR world as well. While most of Mursion’s current clients experience simulations on a 2D screen (usually a flat screen TV or a laptop), all of Mursion’s simulators can easily be rendered to run in 3D via a head-mounted display (HMD), such as the Oculus Rift. Mursion expects that over the next few years the majority of its clients will transition to fully immersive experiences on HMDs. – Len Scrogan
