Europe’s first edtech unicorn GoStudent, which offers one-on-one tuition in a variety of subjects, has launched a virtual reality tool.
GoVR was launched through a partnership with both Immerse, a leading VR training company, and Meta, to create the new virtual learning platform for 13 to 18-year-olds.
“We all know it – if something’s fun it doesn’t feel like learning, and you don’t have to practice hard to remember something,” Gregor Müller, founder and COO of GoStudent told The PIE News.
“It just sticks if you have fun, if you’re engaged. With most traditional learning methods, it’s not always the case, I would say.
“We needed to find something that is learning but helps kids to forget that it’s learning, more or less,” Müller explained.
The platform will endeavour to offer group language learning experiences inside its VR world, and will aim to enhance speaking abilities specifically by dropping students into “foreign environments”, with the goal of total linguistic immersion.
While the Meta Quest hardware is the main option for students, it can also be joined on a desktop, which is also where tutors will join from as part of the experience.
“Envision yourself as a soccer coach, passionately delivering a half-time locker room speech to your favourite team, all while honing your English, or picture yourself in Paris, practising your French as you order a delicious crepe underneath the Eiffel Tower,” Müller mused.
GoVR aims to foster a “supportive environment” where students can easily practice speaking skills with “native-language tutors and their peers”.
It claims that the approach, as Müller said, will enhance memory retention but also “bolster confidence” and lessen student anxiety.
“We all know it – if something’s fun it doesn’t feel like learning”
The platform, GoStudent said is “direct response” to the idea that education is not “one size fits all”.
“We are really confident that this can be one of our bigger pillars.
“As you know, we started with one-on-one tutoring in the classroom. That’s our core and will remain our core, but our goal is to really build an ecosystem of different services and offerings. So metaverse and VR is a big one,” Müller said.
At the beginning of 2023, GoStudent also expanded its offline services when it finalised its acquisition of Studienkreis, Germany and Austria’s biggest one-on-one tutoring provider in the offline sphere.
“They have around 1,000 learning centres, and we want to create this hybrid teaching experience [with Studienkreis].
“We want to expand our ecosystem, so we can help depending on what your needs are, what your focus is, what your learning goals are or where you are in your educational career,” Müller added.
GoStudent’s acquisition of Studienkreis comes off the back of two other acquisitions in 2022, wherein it took the UK’s Seneca Learning and Spain’s Tus Media Group under its umbrella.
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