22nd of April – The European Digital Education Hub (EDEH) hosted an online webinar on “Exploring the Future of Learning with VR, AR & XR” featuring key speakers Robin White Owen (Principal & Co-founder of MediaCombo) and Henri Pirkkalainen (Professor of Information and Knowledge Management from the Tampere University) and moderated by Leopold Stefanic, researcher of educational technologies at the Knowledge Innovation Center.
EfVET is a member of the European Digital Education Hub (EDEH), an initiative of the European Union funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. An online community that connects education enthusiasts from across Europe. The mission is to overcome the current fragmentation of digital education policy, research, and implementation practices at European level. Since its start in June 2022, more than 5000 members have participated in over 200 activities.
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VITaLS Case Study
Robin White Owen shared insights on the view of the recently launched Union of Skills of the European Union, and she compared it to United States’ skills situation highlighting the importance and benefits of teaching in virtual reality, as it can help upskilling and reskilling in an innovative way.
She defended that training in VR can enhance communication skills, as people engage in VR to learn and train but also to socialise and play with people around the world in the metaverse. For such, it is important to develop protocols and norms in this new space. The diverse experiences you can feel in VR enable you to develop a different point of view of Social VR.
One of her projects, VITaLS (Visual Thinking and Learning Strategies), features exhibition-related digital experiences for visitors, enabling significant improvements in communication, observation skills and tolerance of ambiguity. It started in 2019 as a pilot project and now it’s being adapted to some of the most important museums of the United States.
It was first designed to be used with students, building VR platforms and taking advantage of AR & XR to teach technical thinking and communication skills. Ms. Owen shared some insights and feedback from students experiencing this platform, proving its success.
Finally, she shared challenges that the project faces with its implementation in the United States:
- Imagining and accepting Social VR can be difficult if you don’t try it first.
- Limited hardware and internet access.
- Maintaining the projects.
- Incorporating VR content into specific lessons and curriculum.
All this makes the value proposition unvaluable in the United States, because there’s no market for education. The education market remains very limited due to funding and expertise. However, she clarified that VR training is used for other sectors. For example, in the health sector, the VR simulation training at the workplace is becoming more common, due to the immersive experience and the costs efficiency. This is why they brought healthcare students to VITaLS and introduce them to a new tool to help them in their training, leading to real integration of VR among different colleges.
Required Skills for using XR for education and training
Henri Pirkkalainen opened his session explaining how The European Consortium of Innovative Universities adopted VR emphasizing simulation and training. One challenge is the big industry resistance to adopt VR, due to their limited skills capacity to incorporate it into their workspace.
Pirkkalainen shared how Tampere University uses Virtual Reality in teaching.: They added this technology as collaboration tool to master’s Courses, usually once a week. It proved to be useful to get quality feedback and insights from using VR in education.
However, different type of applications required students to have different skills. Some of the key skills to use VR properly are the soft and spatial skills, such as spatial interactivity and immersion with a feeling of co-presence with other users, which is differs from 2D communication tools.
Apart from the skills needed by the students, he explained that teachers need to have content manipulation skills, which allow them to integrate digital assets and workflows in VR, which can be challenging.
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Want a quick insight? Explore two short and powerful quotes from the speakers:
Explore the full experience at the Learning Pathway.
The webinar’s host Leopold Stefanic wrapped up the session announcing the next webinar “Making Digital Education Accessible”, happening on 28th of May at 4pm CET. Register now for the May webinar!
