Teaching Operations Management with Virtual Reality

Factory visits are effective for teaching applied concepts in higher education, but field trips are not easy to plan and organize. What if – rather than the students going to the factories – the factories could come to the students? At ETH Zurich, we integrated virtual reality (VR) technologies into our operations management classes.

“It was very fun to experience a different learning method and it linked well with the topic of operational excellence.” (Student, ETH Zurich)

Visiting factories in virtual reality

We wanted to keep and proliferate the learning experience of exploring a real factory environment, and at the same time remove the limitations of field visits. Due to recent developments in VR technologies, VR offers excellent opportunities to do so. In order to introduce a virtual factory environment for the students, we teamed up with the ABB Group that since 2017 offers VR environments of some of their factories as an app in the major app stores. The app consists of 360 degrees still pictures and videos from five factories, blended with virtual instructions and information. In the app, students can visit a number of predefined areas in the factory in any order they like. Lately, we have also integrated 360-degree videos from YouTube as VR content.

teaching operations management with virtual reality — **Fig.** Teaching staff using VR (left) and a snapshot from the ABB VR app (right).

The photos above show a teaching assistant using the app with cardboard VR viewers costing €3 and one of the many areas he might be exploring. By turning the viewers 360 degrees, the user can explore the whole assembly hall from the spot. The right picture is a snapshot of a repeated 360-degree video that shows how the operator uses the machine while an ABB Yumi robot works tirelessly to the left of the operator. The “i” in a white circle is blended information, which can be opened.

In the course assignment, we asked questions related to our learning objectives. To answer the questions, the students had to visit the virtual environment. For example, in one question, the students were asked to observe and analyze the production layout, internal logistics and general productivity of the factories in the app. In another version of the course assignment, students were asked to immerse in the factories and “seek and find” lean tools and techniques. Teachers can make their own questions aligned with the learning objectives of their courses.

Discovery-based learning

Because the use of VR was new to us, and, to the best of our knowledge, new to business courses, we decided to conduct a robust evaluation of the usefulness of the technology. We were supported by staff at ETH’s Department for Educational Development and Technology, who conducted randomized focus group interviews and an evaluation survey to evaluate the use of VR in our courses.

We learned that VR has great potential to improve immersion in teaching operations management, but also that the current state of technology has several drawbacks. One of the most positive students summarized it as follows:

“The VR experience was tremendous. Great way to get a good insight into production facilities and to start analyzing the situation.” (Student, ETH Zurich)

We learned that VR enables unprecedented accessibility to field immersion. Students can explore factory environments whenever and wherever they like, and at their own speed. Students can revisit the VR environment, for instance, to discuss content in groups. VR allows the students to virtually visit multiple production sites in different locations and compare their differences without needing to travel. They can access areas and views that might be unavailable during a field trip, such as clean rooms and close-up views of machinery. Furthermore, VR offers the possibility to blend different types of information, such as real images and videos of factory operations with overlay digital information, to support students’ learning experience and learning outcome.

One of the biggest advantages of VR is that it enables inquiry-based learning. It is more an active discovery than a passive learning experience. While the case questions guide students to seek answers to given questions, they need to use their own curiosity and intelligence when visiting the virtual environment and seek the answers.

Since you have to look around, you start thinking… hey, so what am I actually looking at, or what should I be looking at?” (Student, ETH Zurich)

Remaining hurdles

The use of VR also has several drawbacks. For example, there is no way to ask questions during a virtual factory tour. It is also very hard to take notes or discuss with peers when using the full-immersion VR viewers. For students that wear glasses, the VR viewers are inconvenient. In very few cases, we had students with incompatible older smartphones or who experience that the app crashed. Other students who had experience with high-end VR viewers such as Oculus Rift were disappointed by the limited possibilities and low resolution offered in the cardboard variant.

More serious was that some students experienced motion sickness when using the VR app. To avoid these troubles, several students stopped using the cardboard viewers and instead looked directly at the smartphone screen or used the app on a computer. This workaround reduces the level of immersion but comes with other advantages such as the possibility to tour the virtual facility with others and take notes simultaneously, in addition to eliminating dizziness, headache, and radiation. And it is still VR!

Another typical concern for teachers is that new technologies are expensive to access and difficult to learn to master. Those myths do not hold true for the type of application we used. Students can use technologies they already possess (smartphones), factory apps are offered for free, and VR headsets can be bought very cheaply. The use is self-explanatory.

Conclusion: VR is here to be used!

Virtual Reality can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching operations management. We found that using VR to “bring the factory to the students” had positive effects on students’ learning experience. VR offers an unmatched availability of immersion, which is beneficial for learning outcomes. However, we also found that the current state of VR technology has some technological limitations. With the continued improvement and availability of VR over the next few years, there are good reasons to believe that it will find wide application in higher education.