My Dissertation Question

Lately I've been working more and more on my dissertation question and starting to write the dissertation itself. Just like writing a novel, it's tough to get started. 

The image here shows a model of what I'm hoping to investigate in my dissertation. To put it into a sentence or a research question it would be:

What technology aid/tool is most beneficial to our learning community when applied to the standard CBT offering, virtual reality (VR) exercises, interactive games, or spaced practice.

One of the features I wanted to be sure to include in my dissertation is a focus on our learning community. We have a typically underserved learning group. Field technicians for industrial work do not typically have the most cutting edge training in our society. For example, when I was working for a contracting company I developed and wrote a series of manuals for working with our large heavy machinery. One of the tools that I used to help develop this program was McDonald's training manuals. 

McDonald's has a series of training manuals that are extremely well developed and effective. This is for their line workers and fry cooks. I'm not saying they shouldn't have great training, or that ours should have been as good as theirs, but what concerned me was that our training was for vacuuming up gasoline and flammable products in refineries while theirs was for flipping hamburgers effectively. Our training was far from the level it needed to be at. Think about it, a "whopper-flopper" was potentially getting more advanced and more effective training than a technician who was working with hazardous and flammable liquids and materials. 

My dissertation (at this point) will be focused on not completely remaking our training dynamic. We have a library of over 5000 courses and a delivery mechanism that is extremely robust. If we are going to tweak that through some different tools, which tool is the best for our learning community. 

Already we've looked into VR (see here). We offer VR exercises as a part of one of our primary courses and are about to include a second. We've already analyzed this against the standard and have seen a greater than 10% better long term memory development for the learners. 

How would gamification work? Would it be better for our technicians or worse? 

Spaced practice reinforcement is usually extremely effective for developing long-term memory, is that true in this case as well?

I look forward to delving into this and finding out more. This is the first in the series of dissertation, so stay tuned for more.