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What is Immersive Learning?
39 Plays1 year ago
You might be here for answers to the same questions friends and faculty members ask, “What is immersive learning, and why should I care?
Immersive learning is an approach to learning that leverages virtual reality, augmented reality, webXR, and other tools to create a fully engaging and interactive learning environment for users. And for students It transcends traditional classroom boundaries, allowing learners to explore complex concepts and environments in a hands-on, experiential way.
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Transcript
Introduction to Immersive Learning Playbook
00:00:04
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Welcome to the Immersive Learning Playbook, the podcast where education meets innovation to explore the future of learning.
Exploring XR, VR, and Metaverse in Education
00:00:13
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In each episode, we'll dive deep into the world of immersive learning, from XR and VR technologies to the best web XR metaverse experiences out there.
00:00:23
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Our host is Dr. Randy DeWitt, a highly respected professor, higher education leader, and education technology and innovation guru.
Target Audience: Educators & Universities
00:00:32
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Whether you're an educator looking to enhance your teaching through the metaverse or a university, just getting started in immersive learning, you've come to the right place.
Benefits of XR Technology in Education
00:00:42
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Join us as we plot out the strategies, challenges, and successes of immersive learning.
00:00:48
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Welcome to the Immersive Learning Playbook. I'm your host, Dr. Randy Dewitt, and in today's episode, we'll explore immersive experiences and those benefits XR Technologies bring to the flourishing world of the Metaverse and their potential to transform university student experiences. So let's get started. You just might have some of the same questions that faculty members and friends ask me often.
00:01:11
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What is Immersive Learning and why should I care?
Hands-On Learning Through Immersive Experiences
00:01:15
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Immersive Learning is an approach to learning that leverages virtual reality, augmented reality and WebXR technologies and other tools to create a fully engaging and interactive learning environment for users.
00:01:27
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And for students, it transcends traditional classroom boundaries, allowing learners to explore complex concepts and environments in a hands-on, experiential way. Immersive learning by design fosters deep understanding by placing students in virtual settings that mimic real-life scenarios.
Enhancing All Learning Modalities
00:01:46
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In most instances, they can move about freely, explore, approach other student avatars, and interact in a similar way to the classroom. These experiences offer benefits for all modalities, including blended, online, in the classroom, and even high-flex modalities.
Interactive Virtual Spaces
00:02:04
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Best of all, well-designed experiences offer immersive benefits to both synchronous and asynchronous learning. In these virtual spaces, users can interact, communicate by talking, and chat by text.
00:02:16
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In the FrameVR.io metaverses, the concept of spatial audio and visual distance is quite impressive. The further you are away from an object the smaller it appears to you in the visual plane. Equally impressive is the spatial audio where the audio loudness is in relation to your proximity to the person or object making the sound.
Developing Critical Skills through Immersion
00:02:38
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And as a person moves past your avatar, you can expect their voice to be more prominent as they approach you and have a pleasant decrescendo as they move further away. What I find impressive is the ability for the immersive experience to take place even when you're not using virtual reality. You can just be using your browser experience to have that immersive experience. It's very similar to the type of experience you would have in a game like Minecraft.
00:03:03
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A compelling feature of Immersive Experiences is that they enhance the student problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Practical Applications of Digital Twins
00:03:10
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And the best of the best Immersive Learning Experiences also tailor educational experiences to individual learning styles, making education more accessible and effective for everyone. Ultimately, it prepares students for the real world by providing them with practical experiences and a safe space to practice and hone certain skills.
00:03:30
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This benefit is most pronounced when the environment or object is a digital twin of a real-world building, a room, like a hospital room, or an object that looks and behaves like its physical world analog. As an example, at some universities, pharmacy students interact with medicines, practice protocols, and demonstrate competencies before entering clinical sites.
Creating Custom Metaverse Spaces
00:03:51
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And while many of these digital twin experiences require the intervention of programmers and artists and others that have a high level of skill programming, there are more and more providers offering metaverse templates and the ability for users to create and modify metaverse spaces with little to no specialized skills. You may find that some of your desires for immersive experiences are met by the template alone.
00:04:17
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Let's take a look at some of the types of metaverse spaces that you could create for university students. First, let's talk about office hours. Picture this, a virtual office where students can drop in to ask questions, seek guidance, or simply chat with their professors. This space removes the barriers of a physical office location and schedules.
00:04:36
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making faculty more accessible to students, and with the use of privacy and voice zones, faculty members can have multiple students in their office at the same time while having private conversations with individual students. Also consider creating a student group study room. Here, students can meet to discuss projects, study for exams, or collaborate on assignments. Think of a space that fosters community and teamwork essential components of the university experience.
Enhancing Learning Management Systems
00:05:02
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One of my favorite uses of Metaverse is to create resource rooms that's filled with archived videos, lectures, labs, and class presentations. Students can access these materials anytime, making it an invaluable tool for both review and exploration. And the best part, unlike going into the Learning Management System or to a web portal,
00:05:22
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They will be able to communicate with other students that are there synchronously at the same time. Try that in the learning management system. Students being able to interact with other users in real time, speaking to them, asking questions about the assignment and where the location of important content is located.
Engaging Activities in the Metaverse
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In these Metaverse experiences, your creativity is your only limitation. I've been incredibly impressed by faculty members that have created Escape Rune activities in the Metaverse. This gamified learning experience can challenge students to solve problems related to their coursework, encouraging critical thinking and collaboration in a fun and engaging way.
00:06:00
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This is especially true for creating science and other labs in the Metaverse. They can offer hands-on learning experiences without the need for physical lab equipment. Students can conduct experiments, explore scientific concepts, and learn by doing all within the virtual space.
00:06:16
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And for new students, how about creating virtual handbooks and orientation experiences that can introduce them to the university life, resources, and meet peers along the way, helping them feel connected and informed from
Multidisciplinary Collaboration & Innovation
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the start. And let's not forget about virtual interprofessional educational spaces.
00:06:33
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These areas allow students from different fields of study to meet, collaborate, and learn from each other, fostering a multidisciplinary approach to education. While we spoke about having resources available in the Metaverse, consider creating repository for assignments and learning objects. These would be linked to the learning management system and can become a socialized space where more than one student enters at a time. It's a place where learning materials are not just accessed, but experienced and discussed.
00:07:00
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adding a new dimension to the learning process. Creating these spaces and resources in the Metaverse takes time and skills, even in a templated environment. What I do know is that the creation of these immersive spaces in the Metaverse has the potential to really revolutionize university education. They offer flexible, accessible, and engaging learning experiences that can cater to a diverse range of learning styles and needs.
Embracing the Metaverse for Learning
00:07:27
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By harnessing the power of the Metaverse, you as an instructor can create a learning environment that is not only effective, but truly innovative. And as we wrap up today's episode, I hope it's clear that the possibilities of the Metaverse in higher education are only limited by your imagination.
00:07:45
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By creating these immersive spaces, we can offer students a richer, more engaging learning experience that prepares them for the future.
Preview of Next Episode: Building in the Metaverse
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So let's embrace this opportunity and explore the potential of the Metaverse as an immersive learning experience. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Immersive Learning Playbook. Next time, we're going to talk about the challenges and rewards of building in the Metaverse. So until next time, keep innovating, keep learning and keep imagining the immersive learning possibilities.