One of the biggest challenges in the Covid-19 era is the seamless continuation of learning in formal educational contexts. Billions of children were forced out of school worldwide as a result of the pandemic, engaging in eLearning instead of in-class instruction. The continuation of educational offerings is imperative as a whole young generation is in danger of being offered subpar learning experiences with detrimental effects to their own development and society as a whole. In this environment, eLearning has emerged as a potential solution. While eLearning offers benefits in terms of knowledge retention completely foregoing in-class instruction and collaboration opportunities is not desirable as it deprives learners from the social aspect of education. The uncertainty introduced by the Covid- 19 pandemic highlights the need for the development of alternative, blended educational models that facilitate virtual interaction to complement physical presence. Integrated learning may be significantly enriched by technology that simulates face to face communication and promotes co-working anywhere, anytime. While eLearning services do exist that allow access to traditional, static digital content such as text, images, and video many of them fail to engage students in highly interactive team work that simulates classroom group collaboration. Through most available eLearning platforms students have the opportunity to passively review content or collaborate through asynchronous services such as forums or chats that cannot effectively replace face to face collaboration due to the time lag between student responses and reactions. VIE aims to design and implement a highly interactive digital collaborative learning platform that will allow learners to actively work together in groups in real-time or asynchronously on jointly owned projects through a commonly owned digital workspace. VIE envisions a digital work environment through which students will design solutions to learning challenges through brainstorming and synthesizing by building on each other’s ideas. The VIE solution will simulate the way that students work together in a classroom towards solution design by taking notes on a common blackboard that all can see and update at the same time. The VIE digital learning service will enable collaboration to take place in a similar manner but on-line, for example from home or from the road. The service functionality will include: avatar presence through which participants will be able to recognize their team members in the digital environment; sharing of ideas in the form of building blocks that all can see, review, edit, and combine simultaneously towards building a larger solution from smaller contributions; and project organization that allows the effective management and prioritization of tasks in a visual and engaging manner. Interaction will be supported through both desktop and mobile devices for maximizing access flexibility. The VIE digital learning intervention will create seamless learning experiences that take place through a combination of physical and virtual presence. To facilitate the adoption of the proposed integrated learning design, the project will further focus on building instructor capacity through proof-of-concept learning activities, supporting content, and good practices. The services will be validated widely in diverse cultural, economic, and academic environments generating European wide feedback that ensures the applicability and effectiveness of results in the European learning landscape. In terms of impact, VIE will contribute to the modernization of higher education through emerging active learning design enabled by digital solutions. It will contribute to the facilitation of uninterrupted education in today’s uncertain environment promoting the development of foundational knowledge as well as soft skills, including collaboration and analytical thinking that are in demand by industry. It will promote the capacity of higher education institutions to introduce learning that addresses needs in an evolving world. Through knowledge development, it will promote growth and social cohesion for the benefit of students, their communities, and the European learning space.
VIE project aimed to fill in the need in the educational sector for high engagement virtual collaboration environments that foster real-time group work from a distance allowing students to concurrently work on joint projects through joint virtual working spaces that all team members may update concurrently for sharing and building on each other's ideas in a manner that simulates face-to-face work on a common blackboard.
One of the biggest challenges in the Covid19 era was the seamless continuation of learning in formal educational contexts. Due to the Covid19 pandemic, eLearning has emerged as a potential solution. While eLearning offers benefits in terms of knowledge retention, completely foregoing in-class instruction and collaboration opportunities is not desirable as it deprives learners from the social aspect of education. The uncertainty introduced by the Covid19 pandemic highlighted the need for the development of alternative, blended educational models that facilitate virtual interaction to complement physical presence. Integrated learning may be significantly enriched by technology that simulates face to face communication and promotes co-working anywhere, anytime. While eLearning services do exist, many of them fail to engage students in highly interactive team work that simulates classroom group collaboration. Thus, VIE aimed to design and implement a highly interactive digital collaborative learning platform that will allow learners to actively work together in groups in real-time or asynchronously on jointly owned projects through a commonly owned digital workspace.