 My name is Steve Wheeler. I'm in Plymouth in England. I'm on the map at the moment. You can probably see the little map. They're always gone just as I was speaking. It's gone. But on that map you have a chance when it comes back if it comes back to actually put down where you are on that map to show everyone else in the world where you are. So, as I said, I'm Steve Wheeler. I used to be at Plymouth University. I still am. I'm a visiting research fellow there. I'm also an independent learning innovations consultant and I work. I'm a global citizen just like you are, I guess. There's the map. It's back again. So perhaps those of you who are joining us, maybe you'd like to put your location, mark your spot where you are in the world to show us where we are. At the moment we have a lot of people in Europe and one or two in America. That's some of our presenters. And I just wonder if there's anyone in Asia or South America or Africa or even over in New Zealand and Australia. If you're joining us then please say where you are. But this is a good session that I've been asked to share today. It's part of our European distance learning week, which has is jam packed full of lots of webinars and online discussion and so on. It's going on all week and it's being organized through the European distance and e-learning network and some of our partners. And I'm very pleased to welcome three speakers today. Later on, you're going to be hearing from Diana who's from Romania. She'll be speaking later on about virtual reality. But before that, I'm going to introduce our first two speakers who are going to do a double hander together. So let me introduce to you an old friend of mine, Marcy Powell, who I've known for a number of years, many, many years more than we care either of us to remember. But Marcy is actually based over in Texas right now. You can see her marker there on the map. And Marcy has a long history of working with technology and working with education. She was, in fact, the United States Distance Learning Association president, past president. And she's also now the chair and editor of that organization. It's a very large, very powerful organization. And I've worked with the USDA myself once or twice. So I know about the American Eagle and all those different awards ceremonies and so on. And she's now CEO and president of virtually inspired and independent. You were, were you? I'm CEO and president of Marcy Powell Associates. I'm a chief researcher and project director with virtually. But that would be the last time I do that. And also accompanying her is Susan Aldrich. Nice to meet you, Susan. I think we've met once or twice before, but I can't remember when or where because my, you know, as you get older, your memory starts to go, I think, in my case anyway. But let me just mention Susan is actually working at Drexel University, which is in Pennsylvania, one of my favorite states. I was over there not so long back visiting Lancaster County, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And of course, Philadelphia. And one of Susan's achievements in the past is one of the books that I've seen is Wired for Success, Real World Solutions for Transforming Higher Education. Now, get hold of that book if you can. It's available on Amazon. And you can see where they're coming from because they're both going to be talking about virtual reality in the context of education. So thank you very much, colleagues. And over to you. Thank you very much, Steve. I really appreciate it. Marcy and I are just indeed honored to join such distinguished guests at Eden for the European Distance Learning Week. I think we can all agree that we live in an age of exploding technology. Could I ask a question about if our slides could be loaded up at this time? Terrific. So technology is not only changing the world, but it's also transforming the way we teach on our campuses. And it's transforming the expectations that the students have when they arrive on our campuses. We're transforming beyond the old idea of instructivism in teaching to the new thought process of constructivism in education. We're trying to provide our students with learning experiences that are active, authentic, self-directed and customized. The truth is that our students have a unique history with technology. They've grown up using the internet, using social media, smart phones, video gaming worlds. So they're not only well acquainted with technology, but they're highly dependent on these digital tools that they use both in their personal lives as well as their professional lives. These tools empower them to connect, to collaborate with each other in ways that are immediate, they're efficient, they're interactive and they're also self-directed. So these students expect the technology enhanced education that we offer, whether it's online or in person, to replicate this user experience. So we have to provide them with opportunities to discover and construct and apply expert knowledge and complex skills using a variety of different robust and interactive digital tools. These technologies are constantly evolving, which is a challenge for all of us in higher education. It makes it difficult for busy educators who don't have a lot of time to research these tools to effectively implement them, to understand what's available for them and how to optimize them in their classrooms. So in order to meet this challenge, Drexel University Online, a division of Drexel University, a private top 100 university in Philadelphia, we launched a rigorous research project to study the future of technology enhanced teaching and learning. And Marcy and I scoured the world looking for these pockets of innovation that would increase our body of knowledge about what's occurring and expand the field of possibilities in higher education. So next slide, Marcy. So to share this goldmine of innovation and information, we created an award-winning website called Virtually Inspired. It showcases some of the brightest minds, some of the best practices in connected learning, while also building an open and evolving repository of replicable ideas. And many of the members from Eden have contributed their fantastic ideas, and we hope you'll continue to do so. So for today's webinar, we would like you to be able to peek into what's possible as we share some of our research on the latest and greatest virtual learning enhancements and experiences that we have found in our global search around the world. Marcy? Simply, virtual reality, we're creating, there we go, creating virtual learning environments that will fill and respond much like the real world. We want students to engage, explore, interact, and manipulate objects that are within them. And consequently, they are able to safely practice complex procedures. They can master difficult concepts, experience firsthand some of the world's greatest museums and natural wonders, historical events, notable landmarks, from training fighter pilots to surgeons, to emergency responders, to field engineers. All of these are value from, there we go, some of the, I was waiting for the pictures to come up at three minutes for a minute. They can value, be in virtual, they can take virtual risk in virtual worlds to gain real world experiences. And that's why a lot of people outside of education, formal education are using the technology. And then while virtual reality really requires special headset or glasses, like the ever popular Oculus Rift or the low end Google Cardboard, the selection is growing now at price points that are highly affordable under 20 euro for headsets and as low as 4 euro for decent glasses. That's pretty good. When you look at high end, for example, investments of more than $1 billion from companies like Google, AT&T, and Alibaba, and five years of development later, Magic Leap finally released its headset that uses a different kind of virtual reality. So this is probably your, on the far end of the spectrum, highest end. Magic Leap one is a head mounted virtual retina display, and it superimposes 3D computer generated imagery, and everyone say that word imagery, over real world objects by projecting a digital light field into the user's eyes. And right now, I don't think it's available in Europe because of some of the standards they're working within, but AT&T did buy exclusive rights to offer it in their stores. At a cost, are you ready for this? $2,300. Now, on the lower end, students worldwide, particularly those with limited access to resources, they can use these clip on glasses. And these are the ones that cost around 4 to 10 euro, and they easily snap onto a smart phone. I like those better than the Google Cardboard in that they're compact, fold up, put in your pocket, and you can save them, and they don't wear and care like Cardboard can. Susan? Yeah, thank you. Consideration also has to be given to the rate at which virtual reality is being adopted, and also how soon it could reach a critical mass. Once that happens, the students will expect for their learning content to be adapted to utilize this technology. So just how quickly is virtual reality gaining wide access? Earlier this year, the Dubai Mall, one of the world's largest shopping complexes, came to VR Park, an indoor theme park spanning two floors, over 75,000 square feet of space, offering a wide variety of VR experiences, including physical rides. Many of which use the high resolution, high FOV star VR headset. And China opened a $500 million VR theme park. These parks are both just tremendous examples of some of the many ways the virtual reality is being adapted worldwide. But just how quickly is it gaining momentum on our campuses for teaching and learning? I guess my visual image is frozen in place there, so as long as you can hear my voice, that's the most important thing. HTC has been making inroads into the education system in China with its startup. Marcia, you're going to have to help me pronounce this one. 5EDU Centres around both university level and cane through 12 education programs using HTC Vive, and now HTC Vive Focus. So the company's standalone VR headset is untethered by courts, which is just another advancement. 5EDU was founded by HTC in 2017, and it's headed by Dr. Sun Wei, the founding president of the School of Software at Beijing University Aeronautics and Astronautics. He's a professor at the School of Computer Science at Florida State University as well. So with a starting focus on university level education and vocational school sectors such as mechanical engineering, 5EDU branched out to K-12 education in 2018, boasting a comprehensive virtual reality approach to learning technology and science and engineering, mathematics, and art for children. The system boasts 100,000 plus educational virtual reality assets in a cloud-based content library so teachers can create their own coursework and tailor it to their specific lecture, letting students explore the workings of an engine or CAD-created models to help students see and interact while they're learning. Marcia? Marcia? Last year, Google brought us Google Expeditions, which enabled virtual tour experiences. This year, we now have Google, what they call a tour creator, which is a web-based tool that lets educators easily build a virtual reality tour of our own using imagery from Google Street View as well as our own 360 photos. So it's designed to simply drag and drop interface, so tour creator lets you stream together a pathway through the world using Google Maps as a basis, and then adding in your self-captured 3D and 360 photos to highlight, it could be a personal trip, it could be an educational trip. And then it allows us to add points of interest detail to the tour with self-created text. So access to virtual reality content is really rapidly increasing, and there are a number of exciting VR apps that can be provided to students as a supplementary learning resources in just about every discipline. We can employ it to enhance subjects like Egyptology, which was where Harvard University, for example, created a 3D model of the Giza Plateau. Giza 3D is a historically accurate, and it's used for scientific research for students who are studying Egypt. Some universities are using virtual reality to enable their online students or prospective students to take a virtual and fully immersive tour of their campuses. So some companies have created apps that allow students to experience a different kind of virtual tour. From basic biology to medical school classrooms, instructors struggle to teach some of the complexities and particularly the inner relationships of the various systems in a human body. Remember that most medical schools in the past have used cadavers to teach medical students now with virtual reality, they're able to see all of the systems working and functioning simultaneously. So thanks to virtual reality, there are an increasing number of really exciting digital options that are available. The AnatomU app enables advanced students to take a non-invasive tour through the body to learn more about its various systems, while in mind facilitates a gamified journey through the human brain. And in cell is a virtual reality action gamified journey inside the human cell. So here are just a couple of screenshots. The body VR traverses the bloodstream. So by harnessing the power of virtual reality, our history, faculty, arts instructors have just a wealth of options for conducting virtual field trips, hosting authentic experiences in every possible location from world renowned museums to remote regions of the world to famous battlefields. For example, Eon Reality's King Tut VR is an audio narrated 360 degree tour of the Tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh King Tutankhamen, which provides a unique opportunity to examine the intricate artifacts of the new Kingdom period in Egyptian history. And YouTube has hundreds of thousands of 360, 3D and VR videos already out there available for us to view. For example, if you just simply search 360 HD Nat Geo, which stands for National Geographic, that's what I talked in here on this slide. Any topic you might be interested in brings up. You can imagine swimming among the coral reefs or staring into the eye of a miniature Category 5 hurricane. That's possible with YouTube. Boulevard VR is a group of professional curators and educators that have put the concept of virtual reality into work in an app that they describe as gaming museum tour. Boulevard VR uses where you can peruse the world's great art collections through the eyes of a museum curator. By attaching the inexpensive VR glasses to your smartphone, virtual art museum goers can enjoy a full body experience. Virtual art museum that has the great exhibits in the world and in the comfort of your own home. That's an innovative team of developers and they're ultimately envisioning that there'll be a giant VR platform that will connect a wealth of interrelated arts, cultural and architectural sites, and thereby would allow us as users to customize the tour experience based on our individual interests. I like that. Tilt brush is a painter type app that lets students move beyond traditional art media and create a virtual space of shareable 3D master piece of our own art. Using a palette of dynamic brushes to create texture and volume and students unlock the possibilities of painting in a room scale VR environment. I wore one of those and tried it and it is absolutely amazing. Now look at Oral Roberts University and they've been pioneering integrating VR across the board across system wise the entire university. The institution is not only streamlined the process for their faculty members who want to transform their courses with VR, but they're dramatically changing the teaching and learning experience for their campus and online students through truly they have an innovative global learning center. The faculty contained the in this facility faculty can go to creation rooms. They're designed specifically for the instructors as instructor I walk in and put in my 10 digit phone number and the room comes to life specifically for me. If I'm teaching live for example it automatically connects the room to my online students through Zoom video conferencing. If I am not teaching live it instinctively brings up the VR platform and object repository with access to all the tools that I need to create a lesson. And so for example I could design a lesson around the intricacies of the human heart and a professor could quickly find the necessary 3D objects and video footage as well as click a button and add voice over and then you can guide students through the lesson that way. Likewise the link could be generated so that students may access the lesson on whatever device they want to use. For the full VR effect of course they can wear the headset and if they're in the developing countries that or Robert University serves they can wear the less expensive clip on viewers. For example specially designed headsets and other wearable equipment enable holography and another form of virtual reality that uses three dimensional freestanding images created with photographic projection. And pioneering devices like the Microsoft HoloLens headset are rapidly being developed to extend this powerful learning technology and novel and previously unimaginable directions. The screen that you're seeing here is from Case Western Reserve University in the Cleveland Clinic. They collaborated to create an anatomy and physiology course for HoloLens. With holography students can cut into a virtual three dimensional human body to understand the intricacies of and the connections among all of its different systems organs, skeletal, vascular and nervous systems. The Russian based company HoloGroup is also working with Microsoft HoloLens and HoloGroup is making science education come alive by combining the real world with the digital world to create a truly visual and interactive mixed reality learning experience. Marcy? Marcy I can't hear you. Marcy we can't hear you. Marcy we can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes? You can hear me? Good. Good, good. By dynamically interweaving the 3D holographic images, graphics and data onto the real world environment, the company's Holo study app provides students with a more sophisticated understanding of complex scientific concepts that are hard to convey through normal textbooks and lectures. And of course, while these extended reality technologies enhancements afford numerous advantages, when it comes to supporting a construct of this education model, there are certain accessibility challenges that we need to consider going forward. To begin with, educators can potentially find it challenging to locate learning objects for a specific course and trying to do that can be time consuming. Then how do I integrate them? That can be frustrating. This is where OER's open educational resources play a vital role, along with some of the low cost and free repositories like Sketchfab. At Drexel University online, we have assembled a one of a kind repository. We call it the artifacts plus. It's kind of a play on virtual reality, but it's more than that. So the artifacts plus is a repository that we created and it houses over 250,000 learning objects that are linked within a system for instructors to easily grab and integrate content into their courses. This repository will be available to faculty through the Blackboard interface and includes virtual and mixed reality images along with 3D objects and 360 degree panoramas. The instructors or the instructional designers can search for terms specific to their courses like they can type in pulmonary system or they can type in brain or they can type in Egyptian artifacts. They can download the images that they want to use easily into their class in a very simple plug and play type of format. The students will be able to access and explore these virtual objects on any device from smart phones and laptops to VR glasses and track pads. There are also certain accessibility challenges for all of us to consider going forward. Some of these tools have to be appropriately developed with the human sensory limitations in mind, particularly people who have vertigo and other challenges have to be very careful in this environment. So the tools have to be developed appropriately from visual and auditory to kinesthetic perception. And all of these limitations are increasingly being addressed through constant improvements in the technology design. They're still very much worth noting as we're trying to serve our students who may have challenges in our courses. So I want to make sure that also we continue to do research in this space and that and we're very interested in hearing more from all of our colleagues about the research that they're doing about the impact that these technologies have on our students and also on their abilities. We just need to really conclude real quickly and so there's some practical questions and some other questions that I think we should consider from accessibility and practical side. I mean here's just four and then it will wrap it up so we can turn over to you for questions. What metrics both quantitative and qualitative should be used to ensure that the technology promotes inquiry-based collaborative and authentic learning in a way that compliments the course curriculum and the field of study while supporting better learning outcomes? Or what will we need to be in place for strategically and tactically and operationally to ensure that students and faculty alike are able to use this technology effectively? Are there applications and devices already available in the marketplace that can be cost-effectively integrated to meet desired outcomes? And if the implementation means creating something new, are there opportunities to collaborate with industry partners, qualified vendors, other like-minded institutions to expand the resource pool and identify potential synergies? So those are just a few of the questions. Susan? There's no doubt that the future of connected learning and teaching holds endless possibilities for harnessing the power of virtual reality technology to enhance the power of education for our students. And webinars such as this one help us forge active alliances for embracing a new education model that's grounded in learning experiences that our students have come to expect. So thank you again for the honor of being with you today. We look forward to a collaborative discussion with you. So thank you, Steve. Back to you. Susan and Marcy, thank you so much for taking the time to present that fascinating presentation to us today. I'm sure everyone here was riveted by everything you said there. Some of the imagery, in fact, was very stunning as well. And I think you've sold it to me and I was a bit skeptic beforehand about VR, but I think you saw me on the idea. So everybody who's watching this now, a small select group of people, I think 17 participants here from around Europe and the States, you have the chance now to ask questions of Susan and Marcy. Two ways you can do this. One, you can type in your questions into the chat system or if you have a microphone and you want to ask the question directly. I think we're geared up to give you a slot or audio slot and what you must do there is to put your hand up. And that means you have to click the button at the top of your screen with the man with the hand that goes up like that. Click on that and I'll see you and we'll allow you to come in and speak your question. So while you're thinking about your questions, maybe I could pose a couple of questions to you. I mean, the first question was about complexity of manipulating objects and tools and so on. In other words, you know, to interact with your environment in VR. And I just wondered what your kind of ideas were about the barriers to that, barriers to adoption. For instance, what about how long does it take people, maybe users to actually become familiar to the extent that they can manipulate tools, almost as if they were doing it for real? Well, this is Susan. I can start and Marcy, maybe you can jump in afterwards. When we launched the artifacts plus repository, we rolled it out to our instructional designers first and gave them the entire summer to just understand what was in the repository, to figure out where some of these artifacts might be useful, to figure out where they might work and where maybe they wouldn't work. We also have a couple of our most senior faculty you teach online who are also in a tough drive mode with it as well. They have to be in a low risk or no risk environment to just practice and think through what's available to them because otherwise the faculty just don't have time. And so without any requirements of any of them, we're going to be opening up the repository to all of them hopefully in January and just allow any faculty across the university to go in. We have a Blackboard platform, so they go into Blackboard, go into the repository, and then they can just plug and play and work with it. So as long as we don't have any specific requirements initially except to just explore, consider, and determine what might work in their classrooms, I think that's going to have much greater success for us in the long term than actually having a requirement that they use it. So I'll turn it over to Marcy, maybe you have some other suggestions. I think some of the challenges you have for most student or most faculty is finding that content. I think repositories like VR artifacts, VR artifacts plus works for that, then to narrow it down because the objects for VR are growing so fast. When Oral Roberts first started their repository, they only had 10,000 objects. Our repository, the repository Drexel has over 250,000 objects. Now to try to go through that is overwhelming. And so being able to tag all of those with labels that fit whatever the course is matters. So if my phone is going off, I don't want to, I turn on vibrate, but that vibration is making a noise. So being able to put labels that fit the terms of the degree, like the program that you're working on, heart versus cardiac or pulmonary, or that, you know, the different terms you can use various terms for medical terms versus the average person terms. So that matters, making it real easy like in reality has a lesson plan building platform that to me is one of the easiest ones out there. It's very expensive right now. So hopefully it will become more affordable for educators and that it allows you to find your object, put it in, stick your own little labels where you want them. And it's just intuitive. I think intuitive Steve is the key for us to be successful. We have to make it easy for them to find objects. Easy for them to flip exactly what they want and easy for them to put it into a lesson. Yeah, I think user experience, user design, intuitive interfaces, the idea of transparent technology that you can see through to learn. I think this is all important for all of us as learning technologists and educators today. And I'd love to come back and if we've got time, I'm sure we will have later on to give you a follow up question on that. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn towards our viewers and listeners and I'm going to go over to Therese Bird who has a question. In fact, if you don't mind Therese, for shortness, I'll actually read the question out for everybody. It's on the chat line. I have a question about those clip on specs. Is that as immersive as Google Cardboard or equivalent set of goggles? Is it as immersive or more immersive? What do you think? I think it is. I have several pair. So when you put it up against your eyes, even though Google Cardboard has the size and the clip on don't, I still think the way you put it in your eyes, you don't need that peripheral, it doesn't hurt your peripheral vision. So I think that it's the same lenses that Google Cardboard uses. It's just a different format and real easy to transport. So I think it gives you the same experience that Google Cardboard does. Therese, anything to add to that? No, we actually have purchased them. We're going to do a virtual tour as we're mentoring before a virtual reality tour of the campus. And so all of our new online students are sending them a set of the glasses that are branded with the Drexel name on them. We bought them in volume, but they're about $4 US for them. So fantastic, fantastic price for just giving our students an exciting opportunity to see our campus from a distance. Absolutely. And it works, I'm assuming, off a smart phone just like Google Cardboard does it? Yeah. Yeah. So immediately accessible to us from those students. This is starting to kind of pan out as something which clearly higher education is becoming involved in. Specialist learning as well, you know, things like medical education. But Thomas Zweisig here who has an interesting question about whether this would also be useful in primary and secondary schools. And also, you know, is there enough content? I think this is a question here at the moment for primary and secondary schools. Could it be adapted to that kind of level of education? I would love to answer that. That's my original background in teaching was primary, secondary level. It is being used all over the world in primary and secondary schools. There is content galore out there. Google Cardboard, when they first came out with Google and Google Expedition, they really targeted the primary, secondary level before they targeted higher ed. The VIVDU that Susan mentioned in China started out at higher ed, but then they turned around and started targeting the primary, secondary schools. So what we're seeing worldwide is that it's being very widely adopted generally in classrooms because they're not online students, so to speak. So they'll have entire sets of Google Cardboards that you can bring in the classroom and you have 30 kids watching it at one time with a teacher instructing them. So the content is, there's a plethora of content out there for primary, secondary level. And it's already being very widely used that way. You can even take a cereal box. I think it's in America, we have the Wheaties brand that actually has a Google Cardboard on the back of the box and you can cut out the box that has the lenses inside, kind of like a cracker jack surprise and you can make your own set. So it is being widely adopted at that age. I think the important thing for us all to remember is that as technologies become adopted mainstream in entertainment, so schools and colleges and so on, we'll also adopt them quite widely as well. I think that's always been the case with new technologies, hasn't it? So I think Diane, who we're going to hear from in a moment, also has an important question, but it's a comment here really. She says we should allow children from the ages of 8 to 14 to become creators. And I know that Diane is going to talk about user-generated content later on anyway. So maybe we'll come back to you on that one as well, Diane, later on. And we can have a four-way discussion on that with the audience as well. But I have another question here, I think, from Hannah. I think Hannah in Sweden, I believe. Do you know about any research on other, well, it's just moved up, on other negative effects than cyber sickness when using VR? I was interested in this question myself and I made a comment about the idea of cyber sickness. I think in technical terms, we call it the disruption effect, which is kind of inertia sickness caused by visual cortex being overstimulated and you're actually not moving at all. So that's one issue, but are there any other issues she's asking, any of the negative effects? Who wants to answer that, Susan? Actually, that's what we're researching now. I know that the people who have a condition called vertigo cannot really have an extremely difficult time in this environment. So are actually cautioned not to use the goggles in this VR space because it does trigger their vertigo. We've had that situation happen here with staff on our campus. So we're still exploring the ramifications of all these technologies. I think Diane asked this question and I see that Thomas has also asked a question. What we're hoping is that all of our colleagues around the world will do more research in this area, contribute that research through conferences and events like this because the technology is just so new. We don't really know the long-term ramifications. We do know that when we create rich, immersive learning environments for our students and give them technologies, whether it's gaming, simulations, virtual reality, any of these technologies, if the students are given these opportunities for learning, they practice, practice, practice. So they spend four times the amount of time with these kinds of immersive technologies than they do if we give them content in a video format or in a reading format. So we know they spend the time with these technologies and we know we can measure their learning as a result of that, but we don't know enough about the different individual technologies themselves in order to determine if there's some that enhance learning better than others. I tend to agree with that. The idea of affordances is important here, isn't it? The idea of perceived effectiveness and what you can and cannot do with the technology. In my own university here in Plymouth, somebody has been doing some research on trying to obviate some of the problems with cyber-sickness using varying speeds of rendering, image rendering. I'm not sure what the conclusion of that research is, whether it's still ongoing, but there is an issue around rendering speeds and latency effects, isn't there as well? Marcy? Yes, I agree, Stephen. Some of the latest improvements have been that they're finally getting those rendering speeds and up to the level where it's reducing or completely eliminating the cyber-sickness. The brain still finds it tricky, however, and which is also big on primary secondary students, is that full immersion when you put on the headset, you are losing your sense of where you are. And even though someone tells you to step off the cliff, we're not willing to do it even though we know we're standing in the middle of a conference room or a classroom on a solid floor experiencing it. We can't make ourselves do what they told us to do because our brain is tricked that we're really in that environment. So the speed limits, the speed levels rendering have improved greatly dramatically, reducing a lot of the cyber-sickness. But I still wonder what we're doing with our brains when we try to trick it that somewhere you're not. I'm a psychologist. I'm fascinated by this discussion and I'd love to continue this, but we're going to have to stop at that point. One thing I will say is that I think there are incredible applications for this for things like cognitive behavioral therapy, phobia treatments and so on in the future. I'm sure this still nascent technology will emerge into a lot of different applications over the next few years as we're watching it. And yes, Erasmus, Diana, is another, Erasmus is actually an augmented reality tool, isn't it? But maybe we'll hear from Diana in a minute about that. So thank you, Susan and Marcy, for now. We will be coming back with a full plenary later on, but I'm going to say thank you for now and move on to our next speaker, who is Diana Andoni, who I first met. We were discussing this, weren't we? Several years ago, I think it was nine years ago now, we were saying, when I sat across the table from Diana as her examiner for her PhD all those years back. I think if I remember rightly, your two supervisors were Lynn Pemberton and John Drom. Is that correct? Brighton University. She's nothing. My memory is good. Diana is actually the director of the e-learning department now, the e-learning faculty at Polytechnica University of Timosvara in Romania. And she's also, like me, a fellow of Eden. And so I think, I don't want to say anything more. I'm just going to hand straight over now to Diana. Thank you for joining us, Diana. And I'm looking forward to hearing your presentation. Hello to everybody from Elnia Timosvara. So we are all of us in different time zones. Steve is exactly on GMD, plus two hours. And I think Susan is about plus five or something like that and similar with Marcy. So this is really an international or global event. So my presentation is mainly trying to focus a bit more differently because we were trying to give you a full perspective on what you can do in education. If you are trying to introduce a place, a virtual reality or a time of interdependent reality. As I've been already introduced, I'm in the Polytechnica University of Timosvara, Armenia. My presentation was included in the Polytechnica days. We've been established as a university and the Royal Degree was signed on November 11th, 1920. By 2020, we will celebrate 100 years of Romanian University in less than two weeks from now. Romania will celebrate its 100th birthday as a country after the end of the First World War, which we know at least in Europe is celebrating now the end of this First World War. And the Director of the eLearning Center. We recently celebrated 20 years of distance education and 20 years in the establishment of the eLearning Center. We do quite a lot more since the beginning than distance education. Distance education is probably about 10-15% of the work which we do is more digital education and the cater for the entire university students, digital campus and blended learning and everything plus a lot of projects and research using different tools in education. So basically my idea came from the research which I started somehow, which Steve also mentioned during my PhD, which was about the use of digital students. I mean, how they use the tools and how they can be integrated in education. I moved from that idea to something which I call open lifelong learning students, something which I consider that especially traditional universities have come from a very traditional university. 100 years old brick award. We have 19,000 students which are coming in campus, in labs, in unbecoming theatres and things like that. So our distance education students are a very, very, very small minority, not such a big number. So my problem is that the students nowadays, we don't really encourage them in the university to learn all the new 20% skills or how to learn independently and digitally for their entire life. So a lot of these tools and things which I will try to show to you today are coming from one of these core beliefs which I have and my team has also that we need to do something to encourage our students to learn independently and digitally for their entire life. And we need to start doing this from the university. And similarly to encourage them to become creative creators. This is a treatment idea about creative creators which are students which can go the extra mile and they can do several extra things and not just create a normal project work during the class, but try to combine knowledge and ideas and information from different areas of factor with the informal learning and implement them in the traditional universities or in the traditional learning and then encourage them to become really creative at the end. That's how we are using this. The others in education, there are a lot of examples and you just seen some of them so I will not go over them. This is another example which I added here because I think that Marcy and Susan wasn't including which is related a bit more of a combination of VR and AR. And it's more for children because it's encouraging them to learn basic knowledge by using VR and AR and playing and using books or iPads for that. And usually VR using education is based on facilitation with inexactible environment. Everything, all the parts in VR in education are coming from this. How you can use something where physical location is difficult or where it's very difficult to reproduce something. I remember many, many years ago, I mean almost probably 15, 20 years ago, I saw the first examples of VR on volcanology. So how to learn about volcanoes, how the volcanoes erupt and what's happening there. And also, as we know, even those pilots which are trained nowadays fly, they start in for more than 25-30 years in simulators which are using full digital reality environment. So basically that's the main idea of the VR using education. Very recent article on the next web, next web from August 2018 says that VR education is promising but excessive. It says on a study, I have a question run by HubSpot, a very large marketing agency from the United States and shows the experience of different educators but also trainers. That's what I'm showing it because it was also related to training in companies by using VR and how this can be done and what they're experiencing. So their conclusion, which is somehow also, in a way, my conclusion is that VR won't be the best tool for every single learning situation because probably not every educational situation will require the use of digital reality. But digital reality education can be very well suited for situations where physical location matters or where a non-virtual version of that location is very, very difficult to reproduce or to encourage to do. We also have several courses about virtual reality now. Even a MOOC ran on Udemy for about three years, now three years and a half when they've been doing it in different versions and using and so on. And it's quite, how to say, not expensive at all as you can see and it's become quite popular and quite famous. Also, there are several VR in MOOCs where you can see how VR and reality are some very small bits of VR are used in MOOCs. MOOCs are not massive open online courses for those which are not in the way of the business, which is where everybody is aware about it. One of the first MOOCs in VR was done by computer science students in the CS560, a very, very famous course. And I will put here the link to the YouTube so you will be able to see one of those examples and so on. This was run for three years in Rome now by the students in different areas in the center theater in America, in the Penn University. So that's one of the best examples which we use now of using also international experience or international audience with location audience by using virtual reality. And you have here in the presentation two links with two of those examples and the things which are there. Another example which is a very good example and I've seen bits of this also in Marxism's excellent presentation is Leitlich, which is part of the K-12 curriculum again in the United States and New York part, which is also showing a lot of examples about lessons about standard curriculum in K-12 in the United States. So all of these are basically examples of doing things which were already developed by educationalists and they are implemented in education in different areas. But what I want to show to you is more closely related with cost-spacing. Cost-spacing is a virtual reality tool which the cost-spacing is free for educational purposes. I think up to 50 users in the classroom as far as I'm aware, but it's also very, very inexpensive and a very powerful tool. And there are several examples where you can do a lot of things with those and that's one of the examples which I will post again here is an example where you have a story. In fact, is the Lion King story told using the cost-spaces and it was done in a collaboratively way with children and with grad educators on the future. The project which I want to talk to you and become probably one of my favorite projects to talk about, especially when I'm speaking about virtual mobility or virtual reality and magnetic reality, is the TokTek project, which I started together with my colleague Mark Seidlenbeck from Bentley University, from Waltham, United States, which is in Massachusetts. And for 10 years now, we run about 50 students from Romania, 50 students from United States, where we paid them jointly in two students, two Romanians and two Americans, and they need to produce a mass media artifact to call it. In the last three years, this was a magnetic reality or virtual reality experience, which they needed to do jointly. Until now, more than 1000 students were involved, which graduated Finnish last year, and we are very happy with the idea that we had no dropout. All of them were keen on finalizing the project, which all of us, which we are coming from the university area, we know is the biggest challenge which we have. Briefly over the project goals is to work with students from another country by using collaborative mass media tools to produce something to communicate with international partners and to produce a tangible work within a designated period of time, which is usually 8 weeks in area. What are their abilities, which they are enhanced or improved or even gained through this project is obviously multiculturality and international collaboration and a lot of entrepreneurship, because they see they can do a lot of things with much more simple tools than they believe that they need extensive tools and a lot of money to start doing this. These are mainly IT students who are in areas with ICP. They also improve and then learn how to work in a global workspace environment and we improve their digital skills. Talk Tech 2016-17 and 18 was a virtual reality architect and augmented reality and these are our main sessions about it. So basically the students need to identify based on topics which we did them like a shop or a coffee shop from the University of Boston, then a stadium or a football stadium or any other stadium from the University of Boston or a museum or any other university or a park. And they need to identify what is common between them, then they need to do the augmented reality and the virtual reality in that place in each country, in each city. Link this on the map and interlink the themes in curve spaces so you will seemingly be able to jump between Tunisian and Romania in a virtual space and see if there are any differences to buy a Starbucks coffee or a muffin in Tunisian and how all of these are related together. So basically these are screenshots from this Starbucks example. There are videos of some of them and I'll put the link here because unfortunately it's very difficult to play the videos in Adobe Connect. And here you can see the, in the last term, the image from which is coming from curve spaces. This is a screenshot from a view through cardboard or through using cardboard and their mobile phones to be able to see. This is the video, one of the videos which are probably up there so I can't really show it. The short is how easy it is to design with curve spaces. So why I believe that neither not only students but even probably children from eight, nine, 10 years on. And we have experience on showing that they can do it, can learn on coding and do things with curve spaces as a very simple or basic thing, because it's very simple with Blockly. Blockly is a standard software which nowadays is standard curriculum not only Europe but also in the United States for quite a lot of children. And it's just dragging blocks of code and so on and adjusting them and playing and then you can see how it's working in real time. It's very, very simple and easy to use. I'm very proud that through the digital skills, digital competencies for creative industries workshops, which we run quite a lot and one of my colleagues from Tinshara mentioned about this in the chat. We've been able to train people from biology, from archaeology, from social sciences to do simple things and simple virtual reality things with curve spaces. I really encourage you to try to do it. There are a lot of people and a lot of them. And the code as you can see is quite simple and it's quite easy to do. This is also the JFK library in Boston because we've done a library in Tinshara and a library in Boston and it's very nice when you have a small window or a small button where the character is going around and then you press on that button and then it's jumping in the distance from Boston to Tinshara and shows how differently and you can move around, how differently or commonly in some cases the experiences and the environment. I'll put this link here because this link is something which I had on YouTube. So it's much more easier for you to play because I cannot play so you will be able to see. This is the Tinshara Cathedral, a very beautiful famous cathedral in Byzantine style and it was short as you see during Christmas time and the students have made very nice things. You won't be introducing a cat in the future, which is usually really able to do, but they produce a cat in their theme and that has made a bit of a viral video when it was released through our open education platform. This is a screen capture again which shows the AR in code spaces and then the virtual reality in Oratma, as I said, nowadays Oratma is actually. So you can really see that using the same place, the same knowledge, students have been able to create a different experience, but a feeling less experience, a different experience using different technology, but which can say probably the same story. I'm happy and I have this video also here so I will be able to share with you as the next video which I can't play here. So you can click on YouTube and you will be able to see. So as I said, all of this because we consider this as open education resources and we use them also not only for specific reasons, but also for educational purposes and cultural purposes to show differences between the cultures and how the city looks like. So this is a put on the last year one on the map. They are integrated also in other the other platform and we have a mobile app called after me. We show several examples of the students work which was completely independent. As I said a bit of research on when we are doing this we are doing now for 10 years so we're trying to refine and try to identify their motivation and their attitude towards learning by using the AR and so on. And we run a questionnaire to all of our students and this is the result so you can see that almost very, very little of them, very few of the students have been able to use occasional or very rarely virtual reality and so on and Obviously, quite a lot of that came for the Pokemon game, which was very popular. And even now sometimes we asked them about augmented reality apps and how they've been able to use them and how much it was very serious international or locally, because we're trying also to prove this international dimension. So we are an AR that it works and it can enhance and motivate the students and we can see that they consider especially Roar and so on, which are completely virtual reality. An easier tool to be used as the best tool to be used in a project of augmented reality by the international community. They've done Cospaces basically because it's easier and simple to use, but they also use other tools to produce their things and we also have some students which are doing things in unity, which I haven't really been doing this presentation because that requires a bit more software skills or programming skills than Cospaces, which is very simple. So this is basically the students. Would you be able to conclude now so that we can go over to, would you be able to conclude now so we can go over to questions. Just wrap up. Just a concluding statement if you wish. Yeah. So basically, this shows that all of these tools that we can have creative creators. And these are my students through a live presentation between Romain and Boston, where they can share and they can present jointly. And we came up with a new project which is funded by the European Union and I'm showing this here and we encourage the audience with how to say to provide information and examples of how digital culture can be improved through different tools. And basically we are looking at examples of virtual reality, art and technology mixture, where virtual reality can be used as a mixture between our science and technology or how it can be done. This is me next to Sophia, which is a robot, which is a humanoid robot, which is probably when I asked her what she thinks about virtual reality last year when I met the she said virtual reality is the future where I was I'm going to move. Thank you. Thank you very much. If it was audio, you can hear people doing that. You were trying to mix the both the augmented and virtual reality kind of applications together to try and compare them in some way. But I mean, let's try and do that to start with, shall we? Because they have different, I suppose, functionalities. They also have different affordances to them. It's a bit like comparing apples with pears really isn't it or apples and oranges. But if you had a choice, which way would you go? Would you have done the VR route or would you have done the AR route? If we are thinking about augmentation, I think AR augmented reality is already here. And that's basically a very inexpensive way where we can do an enhancement. We have, for example, in the mechanical faculty, several examples, but where especially big engines or the different things where we don't fight a lot of augmented reality tools. So the students with their simple mobile phones, the students can go and they can go deep and see exactly how an engine works or different other tools and so on. So that's just one example, which pop in my mind now. But obviously the examples in biology and math team that's huge, especially in the augmented reality. I think I think I see augmented reality as being very highly applicable to real life learning where you're actually out in the streets or in a museum or somewhere. Whereas VR has more applications for things where places where you couldn't go like the beyond Pluto or inside the human body as a blood corpus. Is that how you see it? I can't hear you Diana, you need to turn your microphone on. I can't hear you. I think we may have lost your audio. Try to mute it. Try to mute it and unmute it. That's what I had to do. Mutant and unmute again. Don't know why. You try that. I'll tell you what, we'll come back to you in a minute Diana. Maybe I'll hold the floor open there for anybody who wants to ask any questions of Diana. And also any questions for the whole panel of three presenters. If you'd like to type in your questions while we're trying to get down and stand back. I don't know what's happening. Okay. Well, the same question as before really with applications of AR against VR. And I was thinking about, you know, I'm AR being useful in real world situations, whereas VR is useful in imagined environments or environments which are hard to access. Would that be your view as well? I think we can hear you, but maybe you can't hear me now, is that right? Can you hear me? Can you hear you? Yes. Oh, good. I'm so sorry. Something happened with my, with my, my headphones. And I just couldn't hear nothing. I apologize for this. So just to find the finish my idea and I'll finish because the time is running out. Basically, virtual reality is a bit more expensive. That's clear. It can provide a better experience and where it's really mattering, it's good. What I would like to see, especially for the education sector in the future is to share more of the virtual reality. Nowadays, quite a lot of the virtual reality, for example, which is produced in life sciences or medical science is very, very expensive and very difficult to hold on, which I don't really consider the right approach. I know it was expensive to be produced, but it's basic knowledge which you are sharing and exposing to the other. And you can do another version of, I don't know, a premium version or pay only to some bit and the pay of the youth. Because we just try to introduce the reality to the medical students and we've seen how difficult and how expensive it can be for thousands of students to be able to really join in the reality. Some fantastic examples which have been developed by different universities or companies. Basically, if you produce something in virtual reality, try to make it as open as possible and as accessible as possible, because that's the only way how we can move forward and encourage people to use virtual reality in education. I want to come to you, Diana, about your statement about creative creators, students being involved in generating content. Now, as you may know, I was involved in a project many years ago called Concede, which was a European funded project to look at user generated content. And one of the things we did there was try and establish some benchmark quality indicators for user generated content. Now, do you know where I'm going with this? The question is, if we're getting students who are not necessarily experts, they might be becoming experts, but they are not at the moment experts to co-create content. Where does that leave us in terms of quality of content? Obviously, sometimes, as I can say this clearly, I showed you some of the best examples. I have some which are probably not so creative examples, not a very good use of them. Some are growing our minds completely. They are more creative than we've been able to imagine. So the quality differs, but the only thing which I can say that in the whole education, the quality of what the students produce is not the same. But the thing which I'm pretty sure and we have also done research which can prove this is that by using collaborative tools as one and then digital tools to encourage students to become creators, creators of knowledge or information or even apps or something like that, is enhancing their willingness to learn for the entire life. That's the first thing which I can say for sure. Secondly, enhancing their ability to be more independent learners, which is something which I think especially in this global education system is something which we will be able to have or to have workers which are independent learners as much as possible. So these are the two things which I can say for sure. Is this quality in education? Are these, how to say, access which we can prove is a better education or a worse education? I'm not so qualified yet. We have Eva here, which is a quality expert in Eden, and she's very sure that she will be able to either enhance or destroy my idea. But after 20, 20 something years of doing this as a teacher or as an educator and as a developer, I can strongly say, as I said, also not only my own opinion but also research ways that encouraging students, even a tiny bit of creation, if they do it, and especially if they do it in teams collaboratively, is a better education model than anything else. Thank you, Diana. I get from you that this is a wide-ranging set of applications, but there is still the issue of cost. Now, there seems to be a bit of a disagreement here going on. Maybe I can provoke this somehow. But you say that you made a statement that VR is very expensive. Maybe I can come to Susan and Marcia. Would you agree with that statement that VR is expensive? Or would you see areas where it could be reduced in cost? Would you disagree with that? Well, certainly expensive. This is Susan. Can you hear me? It's certainly expensive to create given the type of cameras that are required and so on. But there's so many open education resources now. I think that we can expose our students to so many different open resources. The difficulty is that somebody has to curate that content because if faculty experts in the field don't take a look at some of these artifacts, we don't want to be sharing artifacts with our students that aren't correct. And so there's an added element of this curation that now we're involved in because there is so much content out there. So one of the things that we didn't anticipate but when we shared the V artifacts plus site with some of our most seasoned faculty, the first thing they said was can we mask some of these artifacts if we perceive that maybe they're not the best way to portray certain models or certain information, which of course they can. Second of all, they wanted to be able to rank or score or rate each of the different artifacts that were in the repository because some of them might be better for graduate students, some might be better for undergraduate students. And they also wanted to share their opinions. Faculty really like to share their opinions about these artifacts. So some of them don't think that a particular 360 degree panorama is the best portrayal of an event or location and others have different opinions and it might be better use in a different course. So I think allowing faculty to have a role in the curation of some of these artifacts is important just from a quality standpoint and usability standpoint. And second of all, giving faculty an opportunity to comment, rank, score them in terms of their appropriate use. And the opportunity to even mask some content and say, honestly, we don't think this is factual. It's not research based. It's not what we want to use. I think that's where we're really going to next because there's so much content that's out there. And good points there. I take it down, Marcia, you wanted to say something Matthew on this as well. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I was going to say that to do AR has always been a lot less expensive than VR and not as complex to do VR has up till now been almost unaffordable for educational institutions you almost have to get a grant to be able to do it. But it's come so far in such a short period of time. And I think we're going to see exponentially that happen again. I used to you had to have the VR headsets with that were tethered. You had to have computer technology, almost its own server to create some VR experiences. And now you have companies like Nvidia that have created a laptop that allows you to create some of your own high end VR experiences without all of the extra equipment. So that actually enables you to go outside of the studio to work. That's just one of the steps I'm talking about when I say that the technology to do the cost of the technology has come way down while the capabilities of it has dramatically improved. Now, if I could turn from the idea of cost and utility and functionality, more towards pedagogy towards the teaching and learning aspects of this because I'm sure we're all fascinated with that. There are many theories that I suppose we could apply to this to try and explain how VR allows us to learn in a better way. But one of the things that has been touched upon but hasn't really been made explicit in this webinar so far is the idea that we can co-learn, that we can learn together in the social learning or the social constructive aspects if you like of learning. This is a question for all three of you and maybe for also for the audience who might want to type in their responses as well. How can VR facilitate social constructivism? How can it facilitate negotiation of meaning, co-learning, all of those kind of concepts? Does anyone want to take that on? You're all thinking. I want to give Diana a chance. Diana, did you want to say something? Yes, it's a very difficult, not to say question in a way, and I'm afraid to a very large audience to say something which is really deep in my soul or something which I really believe it can be done. But basically, how to say, if you look at them, how they were, I mean both of these tools, virtual reality and automatic reality, how they were some days ago, I mean years ago, they've been just for a few. Nowadays, we see primary school children and primary teachers doing examples of, I've seen an amazing book by a German teacher which is teaching kids from five to nine years old about the lake which is near their tip. And to learn everything about biology and geography and water and chemistry and everything. So it's this new trend of having combined curriculum, combined subjects in one project where you can do something. And with VR and AR, you can really do it and make children curious about that and motivate them to do it better. Being honest, these are the tools which they use quite a lot at home. I'm a very young grandmother and our two-year niece, the first wolf which we love was, hey, Alexa. I can't say nothing more than this. So I really am scared of what we are going to do in a very traditional education setting, which we have usually in Europe, especially at the best schools or the most old schools and old universities, with children which are growing up fully digital, fully, fully digital and fully immersed in virtual reality and augmented reality. We'll be able to really, how to say, learn traditional subjects about history and biology or even math and how we are going to make them more curious. But as I said, I'm a computer scientist, I'm an engineer. My instructional or pedagogical experience is only based on courses and things like that, which I've done and experienced. So I really think, Steve, with your job, maybe you're coming from the pedagogical sector to tell us, are we doing right or wrong and which is going to be the impact and how this will change the whole education sector or not. I'm definitely throwing the ball back into my part of the court in Halep style, I think, as I quote an old Romanian tennis player. So Marcy, I come to you with the same question. What do you think? Is there a pedagogy that explains VR learning? You know, they're actually, I wish I could share it right now. Have you seen how AVR is actually one of the first technologies that fully embrace Bloom's taxonomy? I have a picture of it if I could, if you could show me how I could share it. That really, it talks about how... I'm going to show this right here. Yeah, I'm going to show it to you. Thank you. All right, hold on, let me pull it up. I'm going to share a window. Well, I'll just share desktop and I'll make it bigger. Let me make it bigger. There we go. And so if you look at this, I love this. So you look at how traditionally pedagogy addresses the bottom levels of remember and understand and apply. And then augmented reality takes it to the next level, breaking down the information part into component parts and so forth. I love that virtual reality hits the create level. And I think with tools like tour creator, for example, with Google, and that can be at all education levels from early childhood up through postgraduate and then level of the pedagogical approach of enabling our instructors to grab and create. I think it's fantastic. So to answer your questions, Steve, I think with VR and AR, AVR mixed reality, as the technologies become more affordable, I think from pedagogical approach, we will be able to incorporate not only the way we present for the teaching but the learning as well and the way the students can digest the information and learn to teach themselves, creating some incredible VR experience. It does. And that's a really useful model. I think everyone will agree. It is Lauren Anderson's re-vamped version of Bloom's Taxonomy, by the way. But it's very, very useful to see where all of the different technologies kind of fit into that hierarchy, if you like, of different cognitive learning levels. Susan, did you have anything to add to that at all? We're going to have to stop in a moment, but one maybe final comment for you. I wanted to add sort of a little bit of a twist on this in terms of the multidisciplinary opportunities that are available with virtual reality. Our researchers in our media and design school worked with our physical therapy department in our College of Nursing and Health Professions. For patients who are in physical therapy, they've always had to go to a physical location while they're trying to recover in order to have a therapist work with them for range of motion and so on during their recovery. The virtual reality team was able to literally design a game that captured the exercises and the exact range of motion that the patients that were in physical therapy needed so they could practice at home. So these multidisciplinary approaches and collaborations, I don't know if it addresses your pedagogy perspective, but it's really open new horizons in terms of creating innovative ways and experiences for us to help patients improve their range of motion in a therapy environment. I think it does address the question in some ways because you're talking there about very immersive participatory and I suppose active forms of learning, which clearly is what we're all trying to do with technology enhanced learning of all types. I think we'd all agree on that. And I think on that very, very positive upbeat note, we're going to have to draw a close to this 90 minutes of fabulous, I'd say epic discussion around these new technologies as they emerge. So I'd like to thank Susan over in Pennsylvania, Marcy in Texas, and Diana over in Romania. And of course myself here in the UK, it's been a truly international experience as we can expect from Eden. Thank you all for coming in virtually to talk about your your subjects today, and for giving us that incredible amount of information and thought provoking content to go away and ruminate on. And also thank you to everybody who's taken part virtually from wherever you are in the world from the US and from Europe and maybe even farther afield. Thank you for staying the course. I hope you've enjoyed that. And I certainly enjoyed sharing it. Goodbye. And thank you very much. Thank you very much for all of you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you.