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Amidst this COVID-19 emergency, educational institutes are thinking about ways for the students to secure their future. The advanced technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have the ability to plan, manage, and support digital transformation needs for the education industry.
In line with this thought the VRARA Pune Chapter in association with AICTE and MIT-WPU organized a webinar on Mitigating Impact of COVID-19 in Education by VR and AR Technology on Sunday 28th June 2020.
Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe (Chairman, AICTE), Mr. Anand Sudarshan (Founder and Director Sylvant Advisors) and Mr. Pradeep Khanna (Director Asia Pacific, VRARA) were among the eminent panellist. The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Prasad Khandekar (Dean-MITWPU and Advisor VRARA) and Mr. Purushottam Darshankar (President VRARA Pune Chapter and Chief Architect, Persistent Systems)
The discussion in webinar focused on how education sector is reacting to the new reality of "Learning Anywhere, Anytime" and how AR and VR technologies can help students and the educators to stay connected together in the same room via immersive experience?
Higher education institutes in India are coping with Covid-19 situation by increasing the percentage of courses delivered through flexible online mode, supported with simulation-based virtual labs for experimentation. However it was pointed out that mere shift to online delivery method is not going to enhance the learning experience of the students. There needs to be a shift in pedagogy from content-centric or syllabus driven to experience driven. This calls for transformation in teaching that we call as outcome-based and transformation in learning that we call as experiential learning.
AR/VR technology is highly impactful in giving experiential knowledge and taking the demonstration value to its next level. AR, VR , MR or XR can be very effective tool for creating immersive experiences. Immersive experiences, demonstrations and simulations can be created for learning IC engines, human anatomy, neurosurgery , architecture, furniture design , fashion design, product design and many more areas including humanities. Digital twins can give close to reality learning experiences distantly which in real sense is technology-enhanced learning.
Educational institutes may have to mitigate challenges in (1) imbibing immersive way of teaching in pedagogy, (2) developing good experience studios (3) taking up research in AR/VR (4) training faculty or capacity building and (5) developing solutions. Using these technologies for the sake of using is not recommended. We need to create value addition by providing solution to societal issues and problems through use of AR/VR. For this to happen a collaborative model is very essential for any educational institution. Educators, hardware vendors, content developers, investors and policy makers should work in collaborative mode to achieve the real success.
There needs to be initiatives and investments from government in improving bandwidth, establishing centre of excellences and regulating the hardware costs for creating an encouraging ecosystem for the new normal in education.
The vote of thanks was proposed by Prof. Yogesh Deshpande (Vice President Pune Chapter and Director Unity Centre of Excellence at Vishwakarma University)
