School Virtual Tours- One of the Endless Possibilities of 360 Immersive technology

Students and parents from anywhere in the world can now view schools from the comfort of their homes in full 360 degrees as though they were there in person. Thanks to 360 Virtual tours, this is possible and has been in use by so many colleges all over the world. Not only can you navigate through your mobile devices or PCs, you can even immerse further by using a VR headset. So once you’ve gotten admitted into the school of your choice, you can visit the school virtually, even visit your hostel accommodation and familiarize yourself with the environment.

Picking which school one goes to is a very critical decision to make for both parents and students. One could surf the internet for reviews, take suggestions from friends and family based on their experiences but nothing is better than being able to make the choice yourself. School virtual tours definitely help make the decision easier.

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the Education sector especially in the area of student recruitment, as all schools were shut down to physical visits. A lot of parents and students rely on physically visiting a schools location to make decisions. During the pandemic, parents and students were seeking ways to view schools virtually, they saw videos and photos but these were not enough. They needed something more immersive and engaging to get the feeling of being at these locations in person.  

“Schools that go silent this pandemic period risk doing long-term damage to their enrolment funnels, reducing the size of their inquiry pools in a way that could take years to correct.”

While virtual tours can’t replace some benefits of in-person parent visits to schools, they offer several advantages over in-person visits:

• There is no need to travel, whole families can sit down together to watch a virtual tour and have their questions addressed.
• Because of real-time data (e.g., analytics provided to educators on which parts of the virtual tour students are spending the most time on), most popular areas of interest can be easily identified.
• School Administrators can ensure all FAQs are built into the virtual tour (e.g., deadlines, important numbers, program information, scholarship information) and these FAQs can be accessed time and again by parents & students simply through repeat visits.
• The ability to insert social media prompts promotes sharing of the virtual tour, a key benefit given how much discussion there is among parents about where they will send their children for study.
• While in-person tours have to be held on specific days and managed individually, virtual tours can be accessed by international students anywhere in the world any day of the year. 
• They can level the competitive playing field for smaller schools. Many smaller institutions simply don’t have the budget for large, resource-intensive campus tours or the money to bring top students to the schools. A well-designed virtual tour allows them to show that small is sometimes even better than big when it comes to a campus environment.

During this period of the ongoing pandemic, it is imperative for schools to continue engaging parents and students in a way that shows they care about their welfare and are generally encouraging them during such a trying period. We see some schools use emails and social media to send encouraging messages. Also this is a time for schools to ensure that interest does not reduce and new recruitment/ enrollment continues. This is where virtual tours come into the strategy. We saw this twitter message by a school and it is a lovely example of how the school is reaching out in a calm but effective way

“As we hope for the pandemic situation to come to an end, we know that our children miss their friends and the warmth of the school environments…to remind them we have created this virtual tour of the school for them to enjoy.

This is a perfect example of how the school mentioned above utilized their virtual tour as part of social media marketing. It is definitely important to integrate school virtual tours into the overall marketing effort of any institution. You should use social media to boost views of your virtual tour and also to coax more response out of parents. For example, rather than just sharing a link on Facebook, accompany it with one question on one post (e.g., “What do alumni say about studying at School XYZ? Check out our virtual school tour!” and another question on another post (e.g., “Have you taken our virtual school tour yet? Come see our new on-site sports complex).

Our Virtual Tours can be customized to reflect whatever marketing strategy your school may have, be it student recruitment or retention or just general awareness about your institution.

It is best to prepare for future occurrences now and for the Education Sector, virtual tours are definitely future proof.