Facilitating immersion, engagement and flow in multi-user virtual environments

Virtual worlds are providing myriad opportunities for the development of innovative curricula for tertiary educators. They provide a virtual meeting space for those students and lecturers who are geographically remote from one another, rendering distance irrelevant and facilitating the formation of community. This paper will look at those factors - physical, social, virtual and those related to pedagogy - which facilitate immersion in virtual worlds; that suspension of disbelief which generates the feeling of presence or 'being there', crucial to promoting student engagement and ultimately, flow

Exploring Current Topics and Trends in Anatomy Education: A Scoping Review

Within the field of health professional education, one finds that anatomy often presents students with a great deal of difficulty. The literature in this area is piecemeal and there is limited work available examining the whole of this topic. A scoping review was conducted to determine how students are taught anatomy across multiple disciplines (medicine, dentistry, rehabilitation sciences, and undergraduate education) and to assess for any notable differences between these populations. The results found that scholarship on anatomy instruction varies based on educational context, and medical students are the most frequently targeted student population. It also found that the use of medical imaging and computer aided instruction is increasing while the use of cadaveric dissection has remained constant. Furthermore, the lack of cadaveric dissection in an anatomy curriculum does not necessarily hinder student learning when alternative teaching modalities are implemented

The Learning Experience of Engineering Foundation Degree Students

University foundation courses have been designed to address the need of highly-diverse groups of students approaching Higher Education. These courses have been developed to support the needs and expectation of both traditional and non-traditional students, either keen on securing employment, or embarking with confidence on an Honours Degree programme. One of these programmes is the “Foundation Degree”, which targets individuals wishing to acquire knowledge and skills readily interfaceable with the work environment (Higgins, Artess and Johnstone, 2010); Engineering is particularly suited to be the subject of this type of course due to its intrinsic empirical character as a discipline. The development of Engineering Foundation Degrees has also met the employers’ demand for a competent, empirically-oriented work force. In the past 15 years, the Foundation Degree has been developed to respond not only to the needs of employers, but to fulfil students' demand for a course that balance empirical and theoretical contents and learning activities.Another foundation programme is the “Extended Degree” in Engineering, which offers a foundation year to applicants who did not fulfil the entry criteria for the first year of an accredited Engineering Honours degree (Fowler, 2015). Like the Foundation Degree, this course is aimed to both traditional and non-traditional students, supporting and enabling the acquisition of the necessary skills and knowledge to enter Higher Education, whilst taking into account their previous experience (McDowell, 1995). This course was initially developed in the 1980s to increase the national pool of professional engineers, and therefore was developed as a Level 0 study programme preceding the first year of an Engineering Honours degreeThere is a need to capture the learning experience of foundation students approaching Higher Education in order to develop and improve learning methodologies that provide them a rich and enjoyable learning experience, hopefully contributing to their academic, professional and personal development. This paper builds upon the past experience of foundation students to further elucidate the mechanisms behind the learning process of students of engineering foundation courses. The author's experience as a lecturer in a foundation engineering course at a British Higher Education Institution is presented and analysed. The effectiveness of contemporary learning methodologies and pedagogies on the learning process of students of engineering foundation courses, including the author’s, is then discussed. The evidence gathered shows that taking into account students’ emotions within the context of a problem-based approach to learning promotes student engagement and is an example of deep learning (Montero and Gonzalez, 2009)

Google Glass App for Displaying ASL Videos for Deaf Children – The Preliminary Race

Glass Vision 3D is a grant-funded project focused on the goal of developing and researching the feasibility & usability of a Google Glass app that will allow young Deaf children to look at an object in the classroom and see an augmented reality projection that displays an American Sign Language (ASL) related video. Session will show the system (Glass app) that was developed and summarize feedback gathered during focus-group testing of the prototype