Dinner jacket steals limelight as Immerse Learning wins Learning Technology Gold
Immerse Learning’s brilliant virtual reality language course achieved a 100% increase in results at Air France helping it win a Gold Award but others claim it’s down to a jacket.
Immerse Learning CEO Tom Symonds has revealed that his dapper velvet dinner jacket, worn when winning the LPI learning Technology gold award, was on loan from brother Jolyon who insists it to be a lucky charm after he also wore it when scooping a BAFTA award for best TV drama two years ago.
Tom explains, “Of course he’s now trying to take all the credit for capturing the gold. I’ve told him that these things are really the result of fantastic course and instructional design, amazing technical talent and a huge amount of hard work! But Jolyon has it all down to the jacket so that’s that. He’s now wanting it back for next month’s trip to the Oscars where his partner is in contention for the documentary award with the story of Amy Winehouse. If they bring that home we may have to really start believing in the power of the jacket.”
Immerse Learning captured the Gold Learning Technologies Award, sponsored by Microsoft, with its aviation language courses for Air France. The course uses online live tutors in a virtual classroom world with virtual characters. It has produced dramatic rises in successful course completions. According to the Air France, the number of pilots who previously started an Aviation English language course and passing successfully has leapt from an average 42% to an amazing 82%. The results are contrary to many ingrained views that classroom learning is still far superior when it comes to successful course completions.
In the souvenir book of the night, the judges reiterated the importance of this achievment, commenting: “By creating an advanced virtual world that would contextualise the content and combining it with live online mentoring, and continuous assessment, Immerse created a solution that improved on the classroom experience and delivered a robust environment to deliver language training on a worldwide basis”.
Ronan Cornelis, Senior Training Manager, Air France explains: “We are absolutely delighted that our course has won this prestigious award. We selected Immerse because of the compelling nature of the product’s virtual environment, the range of platform functionality and its user friendliness. But we also felt its ‘wow’ factor would create positive feeling in pilots when they enter the environment for first time, making them more confident about the learning experience. We think that impression has now been borne out both from the fantastic results for course completions and the validation of the Gold Award.”
Immerse Learning CEO Tom Symonds was, of course, delighted to win the Learning Technology Gold Award. “Immerse delivers a unique blend of business savvy and mastery of the latest technologies to deliver outstanding performance. This is a great start to 2015 and we are looking forward to an even more exciting year with further ground-breaking new projects that uniquely combine 3D simulation, live voice and eLearning. A new VR proposition launches next month.”