Cornerstone Joins Forces with Facebook to Enhance the Value of Virtual Reality Training at Work

New Oculus integration helps capture the impact VR training has on employees and the new SDK will encourage the broader adoption of enterprise VR training content

Cornerstone OnDemand, a global leader in the cloud-based learning, talent management and emerging talent experience market, announced today a collaboration with Facebook’s Oculus to accelerate the role of Virtual Reality (VR) in training and developing the global workforce.

More organisations are turning to VR to increase training efficiency and efficacy among their employees. For example, workers in high-risk fields, such as manufacturing or energy, are training with VR to reduce the risk of injury and costly mistakes. Other industries, such as healthcare, are relying on VR to train for medical procedures and to replicate otherwise impossible situations. This is just the beginning of this transformative trend. According to Tractica Research, the global market for business use of VR hardware and software is expected to grow from $1 billion in 2018 to $12.6 billion by 2025. Earlier this year, Facebook announced the new Oculus for Business platform designed to make it easier for companies to bring headsets, including Oculus Quest, into the workplace.

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As the use of VR in the workplace expands, two of the biggest challenges companies face are having the ability to easily track the use of VR training content and measuring the effect it has on employee performance. Today, many organisations are forced to rely on time-intensive, manual data entry and spreadsheets to capture and analyse the impact of their most innovative training content.

Under the agreement, Cornerstone will work with Oculus for Business to let shared clients build apps that can seamlessly track VR training completion data directly within the Cornerstone Learning Management System (LMS). This functionality enables them to access immediate insights into who is using their VR training content and how the training content is impacting employee performance results.

Companies, like Nestlé, already see the value of this technology. “Nestlé Employees deserve the best immersive training experience enabled with virtual reality and ensuring we can track completion of this training is a critical metric for our business operations,” said Jo-Anne Rossouw, Head of Digital Learning, Nestlé.

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SDK for VR Content Developers

To further accelerate the growth of the VR learning content market, Cornerstone will release a SDK for VR content developers to expand LMS integration standards across this new medium. The SDK, compatible with Oculus for Business, will help VR content developers with user authentication, company portal authentication, tracking xAPI progress and pushing that to Cornerstone’s transcript. The VR SDK will be widely available starting next year.

“We’ve seen a growing interest from our clients to start incorporating virtual reality into their skills training and development programs,” said Adam Miller, Founder and CEO, Cornerstone. “We quickly realised we needed to create a simple, efficient process for capturing and measuring the impact of this type of training data. We feel collaborating with Facebook and Oculus was the best choice to ensure reach and scalability across our mutual clients.”

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