Spatial is a startup that enables people to meet through augmented or virtual reality. It’s a little similar to the now defunct Facebook Spaces, except it has much broader support. You can use VR or mixed-reality headsets from a myriad of brands—from Microsoft’s HoloLens and Nreal’s Light to the Oculus Quest—as vehicles to meet in virtual spaces.
Spatial is announcing that it’s launching support for web browsers on desktops, Android, and iOS. Oh, and the platform is now completely free and open to everyone.
Skeptical students and their parents don’t seem willing to pay full price for an experience similar to what they lived through this semester. If virtual learning is mandatory this fall, one survey found, two-thirds of students will expect discounts on tuition and fees. Some may avoid enrolling altogether.
Education experts who have been following higher education’s transition to remote learning say that colleges need to act now if they want to be fully prepared for the fall.
Colleges should start by evaluating what went well, and poorly, this spring, so they can start identifying gaps in training, planning, and technology, he says. They should also assess their campus resources to begin preparing instructors for the fall. They may find that instructional designers, academic-technology experts, and faculty members familiar with online tools and teaching are less effective because they are spread thinly across campus, not centrally deployed.
Effective online teaching, Wade says, depends more on building engagement than on mastering complicated technology.
At the University of Central Florida, Thomas B. Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning, estimates that more than 80 percent of its 1,600 faculty members had received some form of professional development for teaching online before the coronavirus hit, ranging from self-paced training on how to use the learning-management system to the university’s 10-week online-course-design program. Given the need to rapidly prepare hundreds of instructors, says Cavanagh, the university is in the process of developing a streamlined three-week course, “essentials of online teaching,” through which it expects to train around 200 instructors. About 350 instructors will also take a short course called “teaching through lecture capture — Zoom edition,” he says.
At our physical iLRN conferences, the first day of the conference (Sunday) is typically devoted to one or more guided social tours of local attractions in which attendees have the opportunity to socialize and get to know one another while immersing themselves in the sights and sounds of the host city and/or region. As this year’s conference will take place entirely online, we are instead offering the opportunity for attendees to sign up for small-group “Guided Virtual Adventure” tours of 50 minutes in duration to various social and collaborative XR/immersive environments and platforms.
Proposals are being sought for prospective Guided Virtual Adventure tour offerings on Sunday, June 21, 2020. Tour destinations may be:
– a third-party XR/immersive platform with which you are familiar (e.g., Altspace, Mozilla Hubs, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Somnium Space, OrbusVR, Second Life);
– a specific virtual environment that you, your institution/organization, or someone else has developed within a third-party platform;
– a platform that you or your institution/organization has developed and/or specific environments within that platform.
There are no fees involved in offering a Guided Virtual Adventure tour; however, preference will be given to proposals that involve environments/platforms that are freely and openly accessible, and that are associated with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Where possible, it is strongly recommended that multiple offerings of the tour are made available throughout the day so as to cater for different time zones in which the 8,000+ iLRN 2020 event attendees will be based.
Companies wishing to offer Guided Virtual Adventure tours involving their commercial products and services may submit proposals for consideration, but the iLRN 2020 Organizing Committee reserves the right to, at its discretion, place limits on the number of tours of platforms/environments of a certain type or that address a particular target audience/application vertical. In doing so, they will prioritize companies that have purchased a sponsorship or exhibition package.
– Guided Virtual Adventure proposal submission deadline: May 18, 2020
– Notification of proposal review outcomes: May 21, 2020
– Presenter registration deadline: May 25, 2020
– Deadline for providing final participant instructions: June 1, 2020
– Guided Virtual Adventure Day: June 21, 2020
Other upcoming iLRN 2020 deadlines (see conference website for details):
– Immersive Learning Project Showcase & Competition – expressions of interest to participate due May 14, 2020 (deadline extended, no further extensions will be announced)
– Practitioner Stream oral and poster presentations – 1-2 page proposals, not for publication in proceedings, due May 18, 2020 (will not be extended)
– Workshops, Panel Sessions, and Special Sessions – 2-3 page proposals for publication in proceedings as extended-abstract descriptions of the sessions, due May 18, 2020 (will not be extended)
– Free registration deadline for non-presenter educators and students – May 23, 2020
International Data Corporation says it expects the number of AI jobs globally to grow 16% this year.
a new report released Wednesday, IBM found the majority (85%) of AI professionals think the industry has become more diverse over recent years
3,200 people surveyed across North America, Europe and India, 86% said they are now confident in AI systems’ ability to make decisions without bias.
A plurality of men (46%) said they became interested in a tech career in high school or earlier, while a majority of women (53%) only considered it a possible path during their undergraduate degree or grad school.
unambiguous message from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), which has published updated guidelines on the rules around online consent to process people’s data.
The regional cookie wall has been crumbling for some time, as we reported last year — when the Dutch DPA clarified its guidance to ban cookie walls.
as the EDPB puts it, “actions such as scrolling or swiping through a webpage or similar user activity will not under any circumstances satisfy the requirement of a clear and affirmative action”
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more on privacy on this IMS blog https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
Use this handy Google Slides template to turn your next Zoom session into a Jeopardy game. Big thanks to @ericcurts for creating & sharing it with a CC-BY-NC license and to @CleaMahoney for pointing me to it. https://t.co/35uTrOBZpO
— Michelle Pacansky-Brock (@brocansky) May 6, 2020
