How Virtual Tours Are Changing University Exploration
Visiting college campuses and universities has been a right of passage ritual for many young students who are planning their higher education. From planning out-of-state college visits to universities on a different coast, prospective students and families use campus visits as a chance to find out more about the colleges, the curriculum, facilities, and student life. Over the last few years, this trend has witnessed dramatic changes. Especially after the pandemic, as travel restrictions became complicated, virtual tour services to visit college campuses became an extremely successful and engaging way to explore potential universities. With the landscape now shifted and travel resuming to its pre-pandemic formats, virtual tours are refusing to lose their luster and in fact continue to gain popularity.
In this blog, we’re exploring what makes a virtual tour an equally compelling way to visit colleges and how they are changing the way students explore university campuses before making their minds about them.
Transforming the Campus Visit Experience
A virtual tour is like a window into college life, from the comfort of your home. Students have the most unique chance to get a glimpse of their future classrooms, where they can live, spend their time, and facilities like the library, cafeteria, gyms, etc. What students would ideally explore when they visit the campus in real life, a virtual tour recreates a similar experience. The photographs and images they students have seen for the universities come alive through a virtual tour. This enables students to really embrace the experience fully and take into account all the different aspects of a college visit. Some really well-curated virtual tour services at the universities also accessorize the visual experience with strong storytelling effects.
Reduce Travel Barrier
When in the past, students needed to have the means and ability to travel to the universities of their choice to visit, a virtual tour takes away those requirements and replaces them with a really compelling alternative. By using a good virtual tour company to create informational and really useful virtual tours, universities can cater to students of all backgrounds and not just those who can visit the campus. By creating a holistic virtual tour, students from lower-income backgrounds, those who face geographical limitations or have disabilities and ailments, can also have a fair chance to explore the university of their choice. A virtual tour is a positive sign of the university’s efforts to level the playing field and enable students from everywhere to learn more about them.
Enhancing Engagement Through Interactivity
For the students of today who are digital natives, they thrive on the ability to click and dabble with technology in creative and innovative ways. College campuses have such a unique opportunity to make the most of this with a virtual tour. By incorporating interactive modules in the virtual tour, students have the power to customize the tour based on what they want to explore, interact with different faculty members, and ask questions in real-time—further bridging the gap between a real and virtual tour.
Virtual tour services are well-equipped to help universities find the right kind of content for their audiences. By using a virtual tour company, colleges can use the right tools to increase their efforts towards promoting student engagement offerings and meet their students where they are.
A tool for informed decision-making
A good virtual tour created by a responsible virtual tour company has the ability to truly transform a student’s life. With a well-curated, informative, and holistic virtual tour, universities provide students all the information they may potentially need to make a choice. When students have the chance to dive into all the different interactive audio and visual prompts and walkthrough guides of the campus, they are better placed to make up their minds if the university is right for them.
