While students are starting to gain more access to augmented/virtual reality headsets and 3D printers, a new report from Educause says ensuring access to these technologies is important to students' academic success.
IT analyst firm Gartner has named its top 10 trends for 2019, and the "immersive user experience" is on the list, alongside blockchain, quantum computing and seven other drivers influencing how we interact with the world. The annual trend list covers breakout tech with broad impact and tech that could reach a tipping point in the near future.
With more employers looking for specialized skill sets, the University of Connecticut's Operations and Information Management Innovate initiative is working to give students real-life experience with 3D printing, internet of things, virtual reality and microcontrollers. In 2018, the program started to work with the university's Spring Valley Student Farm to deploy sensors and data analytics to help monitor real-time conditions in its aquaponics greenhouse.
At Washington College, students become curators, using augmented reality to create museum exhibits of materials that otherwise require restricted physical access.
An Educause project is examining the integration of 3D technologies — 3D scanning and printing, virtual reality and augmented reality — into education to create "extended reality."
In a pilot program at Berkeley College, members of a Virtual Reality Faculty Interest Group tested the use of virtual reality to immerse students in a variety of learning experiences. During winter 2018, seven different instructors in nearly as many disciplines used inexpensive Google Cardboard headsets along with apps on smartphones to virtually place students in North Korea, a taxicab and other environments as part of their classwork.
Imagine the process of going into a restaurant and ordering food. Simultaneously, you could be glancing through the menu while also listening to and speaking with the waiter or your companions. When you're in a place where people are speaking a different language, the complexity of those activities increases multifold. A project taking place at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute hopes to understand how the use of an immersive environment and artificial intelligence can help students practice foreign language skills and increase their confidence when speaking.
When Arizona State University Online students hit the biology lab, they head to their locker, don a lab coat and gloves and start following through on the exercises they've been assigned, perhaps taking blood samples from basketball players to measure their blood glucose levels, using confocal microscopy to help a farmer save his crop from a mysterious plant disease or sequencing DNA. Except these students haven't left their own study spaces. They're tackling these activities through virtual reality, which means they can take as long as they want, repeat the activity multiple times and get feedback from the software when they get something right or wrong.
A virtual reality project at North Carolina State University is giving engineering students a safe space to explore the cultural assumptions that color global communication.
Foundations of Science, a set of tools that will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide personalized support for students in college-level science courses, has taken the top prize in New York University's inaugural Algorithm for Change competition.
