Despite the advances digital technologies have brought about across society, education has been slower to embrace these. This is particularly apparent in the university sector where evidence across Europe suggests teaching staff use digital technologies mainly for administrative purposes or presentations, and rarely to help students overcome cognitive challenges or problems. Hence there is an urgent need to support university educators in understanding and learning to use emerging digital technologies in ways that support deep, rather than superficial student learning. This is a Europe wide challenge, evident in the number of policy directives issued by the EU since 2011. It is also necessary to support decision-makers in universities who have a responsibility for teaching and learning so they are better placed to understand the potential of digital technologies and the strategic issues associated with their roll out. Therefore this project aims to demonstrate how 360° video, an emerging digital technology, can be used to familiarise university students with the real world settings and challenges they will face outside of the university, thereby helping them to gain greater self-confidence and, in turn, greater employability. It is aimed at university teachers and decision-makers in their universities to help them develop the skills, understanding and awareness to use 360° video in a variety of different ways, utilising an innovative online environment where they can design and add extra interactive activities to their videos and make differentiated learning pathways for their students. Universities in the UK, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Austria are involved with the project and up to 25 associate partners such as Further Education colleges where the project’s deliverables will be tested and disseminated with 2000+ students. Each university partner has identified a core group of digital champions (approx. 6) who will develop their skills and a set of exemplar materials to support other lecturers in and beyond their own universities. Key decision makers from each institution, such as PVC education and senior staff responsible for learning and teaching will also be a target audience for this project as they are essential in embedding the initiative more widely across each institution, ensuring it is sustainable beyond the project lifespan. The project partners will undertake a scoping study to identify current best practice in the use of 360° video and to identify stakeholders and partners for future dissemination. They will build and test an innovative online learning environment that will enable users to easily upload and annotate their 360° videos, build differentiated learning pathways for their students, and monitor and track student interactions with 360° videos to better understand how students are applying their theoretical knowledge in unfamiliar settings. Alongside the learning environment, partners will construct in excess of 50, 360° video exemplars across a range of different disciplines that include professional practice, environmental sciences, engineering, sports science and geography/heritage. Finally, we will produce a toolkit of resources including training manuals, advice leaflets and an online course (MOOC) to support other academics and decision-makers in using 360° video in their own settings. To produce these outputs and achieve the project objectives we will use a design based research methodology. Most of the practical outcomes such as the video exemplars, the online environment, the training manuals and the MOOC will be produced using this methodology which many of the project partners have used previously. By the end of the project the five partner institutions will have significantly enhanced the capacity of their staff to use 360° video in ways that demonstrably enhance student learning and students involved in the project will be significantly more confident and capable of operating and performing in unfamiliar settings such as they will find in the workplace. The digital champions involved in the project will be a community of practice, sharing their knowledge and expertise across their respective universities and beyond. Each partner will be able to demonstrate the impact of the project at a strategic level through the work and support of senior decision makers. This will be evident in strategic university-wide learning and teaching policies and practices. In the longer term it is envisaged this project will catalyse further change across the university sector and will serve to demonstrate how emerging technologies like 360° video can, and should be harnessed with a clear pedagogical focus and intent in order to enhance the student learning experience. Students will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this project and will be far better prepared and confident to apply their learning in the workplace, ultimately making them more employable
The project aimed to enhance the digital capabilities of university teachers in our respective institutions so they could exploit the affordances of 360 degree video. The project also sought to make it more likely our own institutions would adopt 360 video as a mainstream teaching and learning tool. The specific project objectives included: *enhancing the capacity of lecturers to create and use 360 video effectively as a teaching and learning tool *enhancing the capacity of lecturers to use Vivista, a bespoke online 360 video platform to add additional interactivity *improving university students’ confidence and capability by using 360 video to simulate real-world situations *enhancing the ability of university decision-makers to embed 360 video as a teaching and learning tool across their institutions
We applied for this project to demonstrate the full potential of using 360 video in the context of Higher Education (Universities and Colleges). Previous research demonstrated the potential learning benefits of using this technology in Higher Education but also revealed a lack of resources to demonstrate its value and to help practitioner use the technology effectively. This included the lack of a suitable software platform to enhance 360 video with interactions.