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Excerpted from an article in Next Billion

Kavita Kumari is a woman Business Correspondent (BC) – a retail agent engaged by a bank to provide financial services at locations other than a bank branch or ATM. She works in the hinterlands of Bihar, India, and regularly struggles to learn about the new financial products and services that her BC network manager often adds to the network’s product basket. She says, “I hate attending physical training sessions, as it requires me to stay away from work and my kids for longer periods. I prefer online training, as I don’t lose out on money and precious time with my kids – but I lack continuous motivation and interest to complete those.”

Kavita’s case underscores the challenges faced by many Business Correspondents in India, as online training has become the new normal during the pandemic. It highlights the need to make the experience of online learning fun and engaging – a need that is more important than ever, especially when it comes to on-the-job training.

Augmented reality (AR) offers a promising solution to this challenge. AR is an immersive technology that integrates virtual content with the physical environment, enabling users to engage with a mobile application through a blended reality experience. AR technology and tools can keep users engaged with training applications for longer periods, and can be very helpful in teaching them new things through gamification. In research conducted to understand the impact of an AR-based mobile application on the learning motivation of undergraduate health science students at the University of Cape Town, it was shown that the use of an AR mobile app increased students’ motivation by 14%. The attention, confidence and satisfaction of the students increased by 31%, 11% and 13% respectively, and these increases were found to be significant. Another study showed that the use of an AR-based application increased the learning performance of a group of secondary school students in Sofia, Bulgaria by 36%. More broadly, research has also shown that the efficacy of the digital delivery of financial education is high, with multiple benefits in terms of helping adults to manage their finances and gain the confidence to make better financial decisions.

Read the full article in Next Billion