Using VR & AR Simulations for Active Learning
Okay, so welcome. Everyone. Just a few housekeeping issues as we get started here today. Please take a moment to introduce yourself in the chat. Let us know where you're joining us from. We love to hear that. Please.
If you're not speaking mute your microphone, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. Either through your microphone or via the chat. Later on in the presentation throughout the presentation, please feel free to put any questions into the chat, and we'll get back to them at the Q. And a portion of today's webinar. We are recording the session today and the recording will be posted on e-campus. Ontario's adaptive Learning Web page and our Youtube channel. And I'll link for the slides, for today's presentation is being posted in the chat right now as well.
So Hello, everyone, and welcome to Ecampus Ontario's webinar and adaptive learning, using AR and VR simulations for active learning. My name is Don Eldridge, and I am a digital learning associate on the programs and services team here at Ecampus, where I work primarily on the adaptive learning portfolio gives me great pleasure to be moderating today's webinar and to introduce you to our main presenters joining us today is Theresa Stagger, Dean of program planning, development and renewal. At St. Lawrence. College Teresa is particularly interested in developing innovative and flexible educational opportunities that respect the diversity of learners and their personal goals. She embraces the challenge of meaningfully integrating technology to create authentic workplace simulations, to prepare learners for ongoing success in their careers and representing today's featured technology is Harrison Ola Joe CEO and co-founder of up 300 and 60 a Toronto-based agency that focuses on building high-end interactive virtual reality simulations in partnership with colleges, universities, and corporations across. North America. They are an end-to-end service provider helping organizations with everything from content, design, and development, through to distribution and support.
So welcome. Teresa and Harrison. I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and honor that the offices of Ecampus Ontario are located on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the credit the initiative, the Chippewa, the Hoda. Shone, A and the Wend at peoples, and is now home to many diverse nations. Inuit and mete. I recognize and am grateful for the legacy of all past, present, and future generations of the first peoples of this land.
I'm joining you today from Fort Francis Ontario, which is situated in the traditional territories of the Initina Bay and Metis people, where it is my great privilege to live, work and learn in this virtual space. We are all convening from different places. And this is one of the things that makes the online environment special. I invite you to share your own land acknowledgement in our chat. So to provide a little bit of context around today, adaptive learning platforms, our educational technologies that assess a learners, knowledge identify skills, gaps and provide personalized andructional paths towards learning outcomes, overlapping with adaptive learning are other technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine, Learning and intelligent tutoring systems, often experiential in nature.
These technologies are grounded in competency-based instruction and move the learner to mastery through ongoing practice and immediate feedback. Among the many benefits of adaptive learning, these technologies have been shown to improve learning, efficiency, knowledge, transfer, and learner engagement, Ecampus Ontario has been working in the adaptive learning space for the past several years. Where we see these technologies as an important and emerging part of the digital transformation of higher education, you can see details about our work by visiting our adaptive learning web page at the link being posted in the chat for the remainder of today's webinar we will hear from St. Lawrence College, and up 360. Their collaboration, which benefited in part from the province of Ontario's historic 70 million dollar investment in the Virtual Learning strategy uses up 360 VR. And AR technologies to enhance program delivery and learner engagement. This platform offers a scalable cost-effective, and measurable way to train and assess individuals.
Further, it can easily validate core components and provide micro credentialing in programs. During the presentation we will hear about how St. Lawrence College has worked with up 360 to integrate, can cred badging issue issuance into virtual simulations. I saw. I'm gonna stop sharing now and hand things over to Teresa and Harrison. Take it away. Okay. Harrison's just getting the screen share up. So I hope everyone can see it.
Yeah, you're good to go. And okay, great and thanks everyone for joining. Today. We will have plenty of time, I think, for questions at the end, as well. We do have an agenda for today's session, and Harrison, if you can go to the next slide, we'll share that with everyone. Okay. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the micro credentials at St. Lawrence College, and the Andro God, you that we use to support both the development and the delivery of the microcreds.
Also the connection of micro credentials to digital badging. Aslc has a long history with up 3 60, you know there are our go to, partner for all things. Digital. And so we'll chat a little bit about the history of that share. Some of our project examples and move on to talking about how we're measuring success and competencies within virtual reality. Environments, and particularly how we're doing that at intersecting that with automated issuing of microcreds and our digital badge. As a result of this Ecampus project and just our ongoing next steps and goals, which who knows what kind of collaboration that will lead to in this large group? So just so everyone understands because I know that there's different approaches to micro credentials at different institutions.
And we do try to follow the the ecampus framework for micro credentials. One of the things that we're really clear about is that post-secondary institutions have a qualifications framework that allows us to deliver lots of other kinds of credentials. Microcredentials, then, do not need to be courses or or full programs.
So our micro credentials when there stand alone, are short, less than a course. They are stackable. So multiple micro credentials could stack towards a course at more traditional. I guess. Postsecondary course, and many of them could stack towards other kinds of credentials, including local board, certificate on certificates of you know, Ontario. Ultimately, I guess Ontario College certificates. We hope to get to a place where we can stack towards many Ontario College credentials. The micro credentials are competency based. So just to clarify that everything that we're asking learners to do to demonstrate the learning that happens within a micro credential is attached to something they would do in a workplace so an actual competency performance in a workplace
setting, we develop micro credentials that are focused on in demand workplace skills. So they're all developed in partnership with industry. We do a fair bit of consultation for all of our micro credentials with employers in the fields, and you know, and often innovators in the fields who are looking at workplace skills both in demand immediately. But in demand in the future, in terms of our virtual reality and and augmented reality.
Experiences. We're always trying to simulate real world learning opportunity so tasks that you have to do in the workplace and the diversity of those tasks that are to do in the workplace. And we'll talk a little bit about that more when we get into the Androgaji itself. At our micro credentials include both learning and assessment. Experiences. So there's an opportunity for learning a practice. And then there's an opportunity for assessment. So in terms of our android, so learning for adult learners, we're aiming to create micro credentials that are available in the moment that a learner recognizes the need for them to either get them entry into a workplace
position, get advanced their skills within a current job, or maybe to upscale to take on a new job. So in time we have continuous enrollment for the vast majority of our microcreds. They're self paced, and we embed variability into the actual design. And so in this case, in the back-end design of our virtual reality, experiences, and I think Slc probably, or I'm up 360 probably gets tired of us asking about this. But we're constantly saying, Okay, so how can it vary so that every time a learner goes into the experience, it's different.
They're faced with a new challenge on the practice experiences that they get are different. There's always like an element of surprise or unexpected challenge that they need to respond to with that environment. And that supports us. So that learners can practice in there, and not only do they not get bored, but they also can't just memorize one particular script and then be successful on that same script and an assessment each time they go in again.
They're gonna be doing something slightly different. They are automated for timely feedback, and many of them allow for the learner. Then to use that and adapt their performance right within the moment of the simulation, an adaptive, obviously adaptive performance. By the learner, but we have some things where based on where the learner selections they make, or performances that they do. Then the system adapts and presents them with a different kind of challenge.
I guess so, for all of our micro credentials, we it issue. They are aligned with the digital badge, with, can cred, we issue those digital badges at the completion of the micro credential. It's very clear within that system what the competencies are that are required to earn the badge. And then the digital badges we've worked with Ken Craig to actually align those to different standards. So we can include essential employability skills align our competencies to those as well as well as the UN goals for sustainability.
So those are 2 of the additional frameworks. We've aligned all of our learning to. As I mentioned, up 3, 60, and Soc. Have been working together since 2,016. We built a range. And you're gonna see? Quite quite a diversity of digital assets that we use across all different subject areas. And we're constantly working together to kind of push the boundaries and say, can we do this? Can we try this? I think it's a learning process for all of us.
I've learned about. Maybe some of the limitations of VR what's appropriate to do within a VR context? What maybe doesn't give any value added. Where there is value added, we've again designed things that truly have alternatives to placement experiences, and I guess expansion of things that we would think about as placement experience. So that when learners do go out to a placement or do go out to the workplace, they've actually had a fair bit of simulated workplace experience. And and this gives them more than what they might have in our shops in our labs and again in our placements.
Do we have video for these ones? Harrison? I've got one for metallurgy, and I can play it here. Okay. Music city. We don't have one. But maybe if you want to explain what Music City was first, and then I'll flip to the video of metallurgy. Okay, that's great. I'm I love music. City.
So we had this vision of a immersive 3 dimensional city that people would travel around. And it's related to a course, a general education course in the impact of music on society. So we had a very big vision of how people could travel around the city and understand how music was.
The intersection between music and social change and social events. We didn't given the time limitations that we had to create. This have the freedom to do a VR environment, although we're still working with up 3 60 around that. But in this case what we did was a desktop version which you can click on different buildings in a city and then be actually immersed within that that building itself.
And so we've got like a Vinyl store where you can sort through albums and literally play things. It pulls from spotify, so you can sort through almost every kind of music you can. I'm sort by artist. You can sort by album.
There's a recording studio. There's like a community open concert venue, where we have things like from, you know, famous. Worlds, impacting concerts across the world. We've got opportunities to do radio interviews trying to think we've got a link to a fashion store where music artists influence fashion. So quite a number of different things. And students actually travel through that. And it's really a self directed course in that they can explore whatever they music they want and still meet the outcomes of the course. They can travel to different parts of the city and still meet the outcomes to the course. And we views like a music news stand as a way to share tax documents or content that the instructor's in the course really felt might be important for learners to read.
Soc medalurgy. I have a video for that one. Harrison. Yeah, there's no sound on the video. Teresa. So I'll just let it play in the background if you want to talk about it a little bit. Okay, this is to give some of our learners who are working on some workplace skills experience within our metal labs.
And so there's heat of evidence. I don't know what we're gonna see here, but. This one. Obviously, that's a level. So you could actually observe changes in metals as they're being heated here. It's a little bit like an AR environment. And this gives them a chance to work on some of the equipment that is both expensive and and time consuming for them. To do this, all in the shop. We did this part as part of Covid as well, so we had our shop instructors come in, and and they were able to do some of the video taping.
That's in here that you can see a threed model of a milling machine handle for exploration. So they they get exposure to the parts they get exposure to the equipment. That's in there. And there are actually is some sequencing testing that happens as part of procedures within within this environment.
Yeah, and one important thing to mention about this one as well as Music city is, they're both web based simulations where it's interactive web so there's no downloads required on this. They could just open it via like a web, any web browser, and then again get that, you know certain level of immersiveness, and, you know, presented with, you know, non-traditional resources like the ability to actually walk through a digital twin of the lab that slc has for the metallurgy course, while also being presented with and exploring, like more traditional twod resources that are linked to all the different threed assets and objects in this one. And then we'll talk about some of our VR. Our PC. VR, Sims, I'll play another video of this one. There. So this is our event planning again, the videos don't have audio, but just something to see and look through. Well, people are really well, you're talking on it a little bit.
Okay, so this one's named event planning. But we actually have this setup in a much larger. I don't know. Immersive environment. Well, hmm, I don't know. For the sake of this presentation we'll talk about it as event planning, but it moves to Wellness center space setup as well.
There's other environments. But in here we had an outdoor and indoor venue that we could have people set up for like restaurants, celebrations for any kind of event, planning, conference planning, and they learners can sort through a series of assets, and then literally click on them, set them up, for within the space, and try to create particular themes with them, based on on the available quote pieces of furniture, and they can explore issues of accessibility within the space. They can explore things like lighting electrical outlets, so you may want to set something up where, you know there's a band, or where there's a screen share within a a like a business conference, and you know you might be restricted because of the accessibility, of outlets within the space. So we've got all of these kind of constraints, and it's meant for people to problems. Solve and then articulate and explain why they've made the decisions that they've made. Yeah. And one really neat thing about this one beyond, like.
Stability with, like the environments that we could feed into it, and the assets that we could feed into it is the is kind of the learning outcomes. It's set up in a way where students actually like take screenshots and videos of of the worlds that they create. And then those screenshots and videos would then be submitted to you know, the instructor of the relevant courses to actually be able to look at and assess.
And, you know, consider all those different elements that go into things like event, planning and space planning. So you can imagine the impact of this for our hospitality programs, our tourism programs. And again it grew out of a wellness idea that we we have a much bigger wellness environment where people might want to set things up for group counseling is one of the things that could happen.
And they're just parent and family and interoperability interactions. I mean family and child interactions. So, okay, so this is a food prep simulation. It's part of again. This is one experience within a larger VoIP environment. The goals here are to adapt. We have some that are just about basic food. Prep. But because and I mentioned the thing about restrictions within a VR environment, things like really fine chopping of a particular food is not something that you would ask people to do in a VR environment that is simulated in here, but the skill of that is simulated in here, but the skill of that would still be done in the culinary lab. So in this space, what we were really looking for is for people to follow the proper steps and safety measures.
So there actually is like a oven mitt on there safety measures for preparing food, and they have to do menu adaptations for people with dietary or restrictions or food preferences. And so they have a recipe. But someone comes in and says, You know, I need a low sodium. I'm on a low sodium diet, or I've got it allergy to nuts.
What are you gonna do instead? And so they look through, and they plan the substitutes for that recipe based on their clients. You know again preferences or restrictions, and part of what they have to do there, in that menu is justify their substitutions, and then there, it's also obviously integrated with particular steps. For preparing the mail. Yeah. And to Theresa's point, like, we've also used this environment for things like food quality insurance inspections. So we found a lot of really creative ways to, you know, build one environment. And implement it and use it across a whole variety of courses.
So this one, you know, it doubles up from like just again learning some of these basic food prep things to. You can also play the role of like an inspector, and, you know, go around and look, for you know, health and safety infractions. And and you know different things that you would need to look out for if you were, you know, a quality assurance inspector. So if you see a mouse running around in there, you see mold within the kitchen that's planned. But just to give an example that wouldn't be in every scene. So a student could go in to do the food and or the inspection.
The quality, assurance inspection, and one time they would go in. There would be a mouse that they would see another time there would be molds, but it wouldn't be the same every time. And this is a carpentry environment. We have multiple micro credentials. Again, within this carpentry space, and it supports.
We also have some desktop applications as well. So this is a framing experience. And you could see there's some follow up checking repair. The learner has an opportunity to fix that if they make a mistake and improve.
And they're given blueprints. And again the blueprints could be different every time they get to pick the materials. There is a safety experience as well, so that they must both prepare to start the simulation by putting on the right equipment, and then they have to follow all the safety tasks related to to the equipment. Use. And in this one there is some interaction with a site supervisor. I'm not exactly sure if they call that a 4 person, but it is on the site Supervisor at the site. So sometimes they would have to report, or they have to put back a piece of equipment. That's now functioning, that would be one of the randomizations that we build in is something just isn't quite working right.
And they've got to figure out what that is is that a material flaw? Is that a machinery flaw? Yeah, and that one has been a multi year project like, we started with, you know, introduction to hand tools and hand tool safety. And then you get introduced to power tools, and then from the power tools like, you're learning and cutting all the pieces of wood that you'll need for the third part, which is that framing stuff that you saw there, and that one was one of like multiple trades experiences that we worked on. We would need more than an hour to show you everything, but you know that spread of projects. I think bridges in too nicely, you know, with what I wanted to talk about a little bit, which is metrics in VR. And how all this kind of feeds into this c campus project that we got funded to do, because, like across just that little snippet of projects that we've got funded to do, because like across just that little snippet of projects that we've worked on you know, we really started to see some trends in terms of that we've worked on, you know. We really started to see some trends in terms of like the types of metrics that we have to deal with.
You know, things like numbers being like, you know, time, time, variable score variables, you know, angles, distance. You know we did some welding simulations that actually, you know, tell you how long your world was. You know the distance, the angle, you know you have letter-based metrics that can just be like somebody's username or credential, or like a little simple blurb of like, did somebody remember to, you know, put on their safety equipment and then you also got into like media you know, dealing with screenshots and videos. And you know, heat maps, and you know threed objects and the diversity of types of metrics we had to deal with over the last several years became very, very fast, and you know the tree Teresa kind of laughed a little bit there at the beginning around like, you know that that constant back and forth between us and the college to try to refine. You know what metrics are we sending? Why are we sending them and what's the best way to send them over to the credential platform? The screenshot. You see, here is actually a piece of at a carpentry assessment, so in a lot of cases to just keep it simple, because we didn't have any of the infrastructure, we would just you know, do things like display it in the simulation.
in real time. So users had the ability to, you know, correct those mistakes, or, you know, potentially display at the end of the simulation. This was good in the beginning, but it wasn't great. If an instructor needed to actually review it, or if you actually wanted to treat this like a little bit more of a formal assessment, so we played around with the idea of you know, let's send these metrics to an email, that could be a professor's email that could be you know students email. But you know, this required Internet at all times, and it also requires us to, you know, hard program, those variables like into the actual experience itself. So we were like, well, let's try saving it to devices, and this solve some of the other problems. But it left a lot of user error to the thing, because, you know, a student would have to then go into the proper file.
You know, find their screen capture, and then, you know, submit that screen, capture potentially in like an Lms somewhere, as if they were to submit like an assignment. So we thought, Okay, well, what if we just like send this to? To you know the learning management system, but we very, very quickly learn that Lms tend to change fast, and a lot of times, you know, Lms is will slightly vary from like one instructor to the next, and there's still a lot of heavy lifting to try to you know, make that direct connection depending on the platform, and, like all the nuances around it. So you know, we kinda just we're faced with this problem of like, okay, how do we deal with metrics? Because every time we need to change these parameters, you know, regardless of the way we tried to save the parameters and send the parameters, we had to actually like go into a project, you know, make the updates in the project re package the project and then push a new version of the project to the project, and then push a new version of the project to the computers, and for anybody who has dealt with the project to the computers, and for anybody who has dealed with you know PC.
Based, VR. It's a bit of a nightmare to do version control, especially if you are dealing with a lot of computers and a lot of different devices across potentially, a lot of departments. So we had to the call for proposals. Come up with the campus for this fund. And we basically, you know, pose a solution to this problem of like, how do we simplify the process of handling messaging metrics for both us as a content creation studio? While making sure that our partners, and in this case Soc.
Had unlimited flexibility in terms of you know, everything surrounded those metrics where they win, how they triggered badges and all that fun stuff. So we were. We had metrics, and then we had a badging system, and in this case it was can cred that we kind of posted as the the example for the project I'll try not to get to technical in terms of what it is we actually built and how we approach the problem and the solution of the problem. But if for anybody who wants to to narrate with me a little bit later, I go, you know, into the technicals.
I'm happy to elaborate, but the most simplified way to explain what we did was kind of in this little diagram that I'll show you. So we have the metrics and all of these metrics essentially lived in one of these simulations. Most of the simulations that we dealt with were desktop simulations. So those traditionally are like a little exe file that gets downloaded on the computer. That gets exported from the game engine that we build it in.
So the metrics ultimately live in the simulation, you know, and again, metrics could be accommodation of any different thing rather than locking ourselves to sending it directly to the system. First, like, you know, can crack or blackboard, or d 2 l. Or like one of those platforms, we said, let's put a platform in between where they need to go, and the experience. So that every time, you know, Teresa and her team come to us and says, Hey, can we, like, you know, adjust these variables, adjust those variables.
We would be able to adjust the metric parameters, and then in the web version it would change the way we send. You know, triggers to an external system like can cred to issue badges. So the way we handle this was again, we have metrics that live in the simulation.
We would essentially create metric ids in the web platform. You know. That would be metric. One metric, 2, metric, 3, and then we could create a set of custom parameters for each metric and parameters could look like anything. So can be, you know, if metric one is equal to. Yes, if metric 2, you know, is equal to, or less than 50 or metric, 2 is equal to, or less than 50 or metric. 2 is equal to, or less than a 100. We could customize those in a essentially an infinite way, and create as many of these parameters as we want, and then we could take groupings of these parameters and create custom triggers and the groupings of
parameters to trigger different things. So you know, we use carpentry as an example where you know one use case of carpentry maybe needs to be metrics to issue a beginner carpentry badge. But then another version of that, for maybe, say, high school students needed a different set of parameters to issue like an introductory badge. So ultimately we built this framework through a lot of trial and error, and a lot of trying to like grossly oversimplify things and get to like the very very foundational side of things, to be able to move the need to go into the projects every single time and put that intermediary between. Again the simulations that get built or the content creators that are building the simulations and the platform where they'll eventually end up so that we could make fast rapid. You know, quick iterations, you know, within a matter of minutes.
Every time, you know, we wanted to explore or change the parameters of like how these badges were triggered. So essentially this platform that we built automated the whole process. The version of the platform that we created as part of the project looked like this, and this was probably a year ago, maybe even 2.
Now time is flying very fast, so sometimes I lose track of how long it's been. But it was this system that again allowed us to go in, create metric keys and hard code. Our experiences to point those metrics into this web-based system and we called it the Immersive Learning Platform, or the Ilp for short and setup in a way there that it would work for our studio.
But also every other Development company, or every other institution that was building these VR. Desktop-based simulations, and we're running into the same challenges that we ran into. We played with it for the last year or so, and ultimately the direction that we're taking.
It is a little bit more holistic and a little bit more wider reaching, because, you know, handling metrics became one part of the problem. But we really quickly, you know, realize that there were a lot of other moving pieces that we felt were you know, were challenges that we were facing with St. Lawrence College, but the more we to you know other developers, the more we talk to other college partners it became abundantly clear that you know these problems were across the board. So we we took the framework for handling metrics, and we've kind of baked that into the second version of this immersive learning platform that we put together. And we now are, you know, approaching it a way where it makes content management easy. From the time we actually build it, and our testing with our partners all the way through to the time we're ready to potentially distribute it to partners outside of the original institution.
Making metric integration easy and you know how we deal with those metrics. Easy, and then for all of our educational partners, it makes it really really easy to kind of follow that flow of content, management, device, management, user management, and I can give them complete control over that credentialing process. So on the fly. If they wanted to again, you know, add extra content into new courses, or, you know, adjust the parameters around badges. They would essentially be able to do all this through the web, and allow content to be more widely used, because again, these simulations, they type.
They take a lot of time and energy and resources to build. So the more creative way we can find to use them across. You know, different different subject matters. You know different levels of education from from, you know I don't learners to. You know, students in college through to high school students. The more value, you know, Aslc and our college partners, you know, get out of the content. So we're trying to take from our learnings. From this first version of the platform. And again, really, just build it out in a way where it solves a lot of that barrier to entry for colleges.
And and for you know, educators and trainers that want to somehow figure out how to use immersive learning within the context of education and training. And then, you know, kind of looking forward. You know we have a lot of really fun, interesting projects that we're still, you know, working on with Slc. You know some are interactive web. Some are, you know, desktop based, some our VR based, and we're trying to find ways to leverage a lot of this existing content that we've already built into other Slc programs now that we've built some of this infrastructure behind the scenes, and we're exploring things like adaptive micro credentials for high school students.
So get, how do we simplify the parameters around something like this framing experience, or this electrical experience to a point where a high school student would be able to potentially use it for some level of learning or somebody going through like a workforce development or an employment center would be able to use it for some level of learning. And it's again a big learning process. You know there's no hard and fast way to do this, so we very much are kind of still learning as we're going, and I think Teresa will be the first to say that, like you know, we've seen a lot of success out of this. But we still definitely have a lot to learn so we're just trying to.
Really, you know, go slow and kind of walk before we run here. And then also, you know, take all of these learnings and try to solve problems. You know, as we progress, projects forward and share what we're. You know what we're learning with with other partners along the way, because, you know, we both kind of have a goal to get immersive learning technologies. And these interactive web technologies, you know, into as many places as possible. And the only way to do that is through, you know, collaborations and partnerships.
And you know, I saw a lot of participants in here today from so the other, you know, collaborative partnerships that we have on the go with Slc. You know, Georgian College, Mohawk, some power engineering stuff. So it's really all about, you know, building some of these tools to solve some of these bigger problems so that we can move e-learning forward as a whole. And and, you know, make education more accessible to people who are, you know, non-traditional learners. And I'm just gonna jump in there, too, to say like one of the challenges. And I I responded to a question Annie asked in the chat, as you know, at at this point we are kind of tied to offering our VR.
Equipment on campus. We've got a mobile lab. We've got a couple of mobile labs where we take that equipment out. And so we're able to make the VR experiences more accessible to others. Where we take that equipment out. And so we're able to make the VR experiences more accessible to others. We other instructions where they've got their own VR equipment, so we can link out our resources. And and they can use them, but not every student's got that equipment right.
So there's always that piece around. How do you make this accessible? You also don't necessarily wanna just distribute it free widely. And for everyone who does have a you know their own headsets. So there's there's those kinds of challenges. There was another question in the chat, too, that I just want to address.
So it was about creating VR content. And I maybe this goes back to the piece about what we find is worth investing in in VR, and what we find is not like we don't use VR environments to quote present content in a in a traditional way, like we use the VR environment as an application of practice, of skills and competence. So if there's quote content knowledge to be acquired in advance of that, you know, we try to present that in in another environment first and and in in most cases, because we're limited in terms of you know investment, in VR is one of the the limits there is. We don't want people coming into an immersive environment just being presented with text. Or you know, watching a lecture video in there, or you know, even a even a demo video like, what's the value of that within the VR, so we're really strategic about what we do in the VR, and it's an opportunity for a practice and we are just working on some multi-player things right now. Yeah. James had a question about single users versus multiplayer so yeah, like, Trisha said, we're in the middle of working on some new multiplayer experiences.
And the nice thing with with some of the infrastructure that we're building behind the scenes is once we have a multiplier network, you know, fully up and running, it becomes relatively plug and play. So you know, all projects moving forward theoretically, could, you know, be the multi-user if we wanted it to? That's fantastic. We have another question in here, just in terms around. When is it kind of the budget to create something like the metallurgy lab? As an example? Is there kind of a timeline resources for funding like to create these? And I guess my extension. I have a question. Around this, too, is, is there a place where educators can find some of these ready-made assets that could be without having to create them integrated into an existing curriculum? Is good. Can you shed any light on that?
Well, there are places where there's digital assets like meaning imagery. That's easy to integrate into a Br. Experience for us. I think a lot of the work isn't unless we have a clear vision for the environment that we work with.
Up 360, and we talk through that. And it's more about the functionality of what we want to do. That's the challenge, right? So if you're just going into an environment to walk around and you're just going into an environment to walk around. And I think those are, you know, pretty easy to do quite quickly, but it's the functionality and the tracking of the users experience and their decision making, and the choices and what they do within there. That is really the work. So like our carpentry one, we built 3 different experiences in there. But that probably took what? Like 3 years really, from start to finish, a Harrison like about a year, maybe year each yeah. Yeah, yeah, that sounds a bit right? Yeah. You know, from a visual perspective like, art represents, you know, 25%, if I'm not a little bit less of a build out, it's the game play programming. And I say, game play because it. You know the practices that we follow, and the same as what you would follow to.
You know, develop a game. So it's all those mechanical interactions, you know, the picking up of of a mail gun, and then the nailing. And then you know the programming around measuring. If they put the nails in the right place versus the wrong place that becomes very complicated, and that that is the majority of the work for anyone who's interested in just like threed assets, you know, threed environments. Even our studio to save time and money on the art side, will leverage asset packs sometimes, and there's a lot of really good libraries for that, like turbo swed, you know, unreal engine has its own assets. Store this extension. We develop in so if you're looking for just, you know, assets that can be brought into like a simple web threed viewer, or like a simple, you know, VR environment, or like even an AR environment, you could do that for relatively low cost. But yeah, that the time commitments and the resource commitments to build these bigger experiences are definitely up there.
But the more we build the quicker it gets. And you know, now we're at a point where, like we could build a project with same or college within a few months, when you know back when we first started, it would take almost a year to do some of these things. Thank you. We have another question. It says, we're students uploaded into the student information system and received a student number, or do they remain separate as a micro credential consumer? I guess so. So to all of our students like, even if they're enrolling through our continuing education, would get a student number, and they can work through that way.
But if they're coming in through, let's say workforce development, they may sometimes not have, I guess, the same kind of credential. We still track them. But and all you would need to log in. To some of these experiences is an email address and an access code. Thank you. Another question to come in. Do you also do augmented reality along with the VR. Yeah. What is the example of an AR situation that you have? So I think we've got some augmented reality. That is focused within that metallurgy I'd have to go back to that with that metallurgy environment.
And there's another one related to like some chemistry, biotech piece where we have augmented reality and we're now just working on some augmented reality. That is about the human interaction. So we've had some initial conversations with up 3 60 about that. But we're not not quite there yet.
Yeah, we dabble. But we find that building for something like AR can be like easier time wise but more challenging from the user experience. Perspective because a lot of these ars, you know, if you use the really high end headsets like, you know, the mixed reality holds device, or like the magic leap device, they're very early stage and like limited and like their fidelity and like their visual quality, there's a lot of like nuances like just getting those things up and running. And then, if you try to deliver it, you know, to say everybody smartphone, you have to.
Factor in, you know, who has a high end device versus a low-end device, and then against you know those 2 experiences could be night and day different. If somebody's on a low end. Smartphone versus a high end phone. So you know, AR for us, although we feel like it has a lot of potential applications in in education until they really get the the wearables to a point where, you know, they're super scalable.
We're not as actively pursuing that we feel like AR is best fit into like, you know, consumer marketing. You know, experiences, little activations and more immersive web or VR. It really seems to be the best path forward for education, with just a current state of hardware. Thank you. We have another question. Have you created for the use of the hollow lens? Not yet no, not not with Slc. We again.
We've dabbled, but it's not for any of our projects. No. Thank you. So we have a hand up, Melanie. Feel free to open your microphone. Alright! Hi, Harrison! How are you? Nice to see you? Nice to see some things that you're working on. So this, all this is all very exciting. I am curious, and I'm I don't know if maybe I didn't have like multiple meetings back to back today. So I don't know. So the purpose of today is to, is it just like information sharing?
Are you looking for partners to work with? Are you? Are these simulations that that we can try? I'll start with that. Mainly information share. But I know Teresa is always always open to partnerships and collaboration, so I'll let her feel that one. Okay. Yeah, like, if people think there's something that you know, it's budget season, too. Right? So, if people think there's something that they really wanna collaborate on, I think there's definitely like openness to having those conversations for sure.
And trying out things you know. I don't see why we wouldn't. We wouldn't make that possible. We just have to figure out the logistics of that, because again, we don't necessarily just distribute the files out there. Yeah. Yeah, and I'll add to that anything that you guys can take from us to avoid some mistakes that we've made over the last, you know, 3 or 4 years, you know. That's why we're in it, right, you know. We wanna help other other organizations, you know. Learn from from our mistakes, you know.
Learn from our successes, because mistakes are expensive, and you know we have a lot of college partners that, like, you know, pre-emptively bought a lot of hardware and then, you know, the hardware. Ends up on a shelf somewhere. And then, you know, they kind of come to us and be like, Hey, what's going on here like? Why don't? What like? Why are we able to use this hardware? And so like purchasing decisions around hardware, around like what software is at there. There's so many nuances, because the industry is moving so fast for anyone that's just interested in like building a little bit of a strategy and just picking our brains like that. We're here as a resource, and we're happy to like, you know, support any capacity.
Yeah, that's a great point, Harrison, because there are some other things like, again, if we're buying equipment, or there's things that we're wondering about in terms of, you know, setting up a space or functionality, we will reach out to our friends at up 3 60 and ask them questions about that. Yup, Paul, Melanie, is there another part of your question? I'm just curious. Yeah, just one more question. If you, Teresa, if you guys have done anything in the kind of the health care field. With Harrison. We're doing a lab right now, and I'm trying to think what else we've done.
So our wellness center depending on like, if you're talking, you know. Allied health, I guess, are well known. Center has that capability. We've built the environment. This goes back to like managing resources. So in our wellness center, we built the physical environments. And then we're moving forward, then will work with up 360 around different functionalities for different programs.
Yep. And different professional learnings within there. So that's probably a next step for us. Yeah, we do have a health care related project in the queue right now with us.
So that's more focused on like traditional health care. You know, emergency services, type environments. Okay, excellent thanks for sharing guys. Hey! Noise! Thank you. Harrison. Did you want to address Paul's question?
There. Just want really quick, and then we'll wrap things up. Yeah. Yeah. So Paul's question was creative Commons for a lot of the simulations we showed, and I know cause those were kind of pre-campus the platform that we're building, though there is going to be a free version of it available for any colleges. That need, you know, to use that infrastructure for things like content, management and content, distribution. So there'll be some abilities for colleges to access that, and then there are a few ecampus funded projects that I believe fall under, create creative commons that we're collaborating with Slc and a few other colleges on one for I believe power engineering and then another one for Hvac that I think will fall into that. So any any colleges that are looking for that type of content, you know, can feel free to reach out and then, even if you saw something today that you're interested in that, you know, we built with Slc, I would say, definitely connect with Teresa. Because yeah, we want to just see as many partners use as I would say, definitely connect with Teresa. Because, yeah, we want to just see as many partners use this as possible.
She can feel the, you know, the budgetary questions and the you know, who gets access to those ones that are more pricetary to Slc. But we're big proponents of, you know, collaboration and content sharing because like the end result here is that we have everything in VR and there's no way. That like, you know, we can do this by ourselves, and why build something twice right? Well, thank you very much for sharing your experiences here today. It was very informative. I do want to thank everyone here in our audience.
I hope that, and to Melanie's point earlier kind of the purpose behind these these webinars is really to encourage people to think about these types of assets. That's certainly objective of the campus, and to hopefully inspire collaborations and activity in creating, I think, what is really innovative educational experiences for learners. I also, wanna really thank our Ecamus Ontario communications team who make these webinars possible and handle all the social media posts and emails we couldn't create these types of experiences without them. Our adaptive learning file is found on our adaptive learning.
Web, page, which link will be shared in our chat today was actually the fourth webinar in our series in the adaptive learning area, our next webinars actually coming up on February the 20 s, and you can register for that now and more information will be sent out to individuals on our adaptive learning lists to register for that look, feel will post a link in the chat there, so that you can register for that next February the 20 s event and we're going to be hearing from Georgian college and their implementation of the serago adaptive learning platform in their communications courses. So it's a little bit of a different take on adaptive learning. We're trying to keep things as enthusiastic here as possible. Another few quick announcements before we we go. Our open library is also hosting a series of events someone was good enough to post a link in the chat to you. Campaign Ontario's open library, where you can explore our oer collection. So they are hosting events that will cover things like roleplay gamification, bilingual contexts, and more.
They are also offering virtual drop-in sessions where you can get help with oer. Find out more about the O. We are our library, and engage with it with our open library team. So there's some links look, feel, will post in the chat for their events, and how to access that information just in terms of other opportunities Ontario extend is currently offering live sessions to engage in that micro credential program.
To become an empowered educator. So check out our Ontario, extend web page to enroll in those micro credentials. They are free, they certainly benefit your educational practice and help build connections with other educators across the province, and best yet, we're gonna have those live sessions to help you get to that micro credential. And finally Ecampus Ontario will be hosting our microcontroller Forum march first to third. This event will include an in-person session at Toronto's Globe and Mail Center on March the first, and a virtual event on March the second and third come out and explore the evolving relationship between micro credentials and the labor market lots of great information for that you can purchase tickets and register for this free version event by visiting the registration page. Now being posted in the chat, I will follow up with everyone.
Register for today's session. With all of these links as well, in case you can't grab them, because there's lots of great opportunities to put on your calendar as we come here and roll into March. So thank you. Everyone for attending today. Thank you again to our presenters, and I wish you a good rest of the week. Bye!
2023-02-15 15:33
