OptimaEd introduced its first VR public charter school, Optima Classical Academy, which opened its doors Fall 2022 in Florida. As a VR-first school, student scholars spend four hours per day in interactive, virtual reality-based lessons. Optima Classical Academy enrolled students in 3rd to 8th grade in its inaugural 2022-2023 school year with more students and grades to be added in the future. OptimaEd is pioneering the future of XR education. In just one week, scholars spent 1,513 hours and 49 minutes in VR. Most organizations use VR as a supplement to their main offering, but OptimaEd is leading the industry by making VR core to their pedagogy. Behind Optima Classical Academy is ENGAGE, a virtual communications platform that simulates the way we interact in the physical world, but without physical limitations. The ENGAGE software powers OptimaEd’s virtual classrooms and VR-based learning experiences. ENGAGE empowers organizations to utilize virtual spaces and locations for metaverse learning, content creation, and content libraries for developers, educators, and students to use everyday.
OptimaEd partners with ManageXR to control their devices, distribute the ENGAGE software and device settings, and simplify the VR home screen. Student scholars, who are often first time users of VR, need simple and intuitive home screen menus and navigation to ensure uninterrupted and seamless learning experiences. ManageXR empowers educators and creators to customize their home screens to cater to the needs of their audience. With ManageXR’s Remote Screen View, tech support can see what’s happening inside the headset in real-time to guide users and troubleshoot issues. Additionally, OptimaEd can ensure a safe and secure experience for students by leveraging ManageXR’s configurations and security settings. These features safeguard students by only allowing them to access intended content. "Selecting ManageXR as OptimaEd's headset management platform partner ensures that we will be able to provide a safe and secure VR environment for our scholars," said Adam Mangana, executive director of OptimaEd. "ManageXR gives us the ability to manage, monitor and secure our headsets so that our scholars’ experience in VR is only what the academy determines is necessary for its classical curriculum and lets us keep them in a reliable learning environment."
ENGAGE partners with ManageXR to eliminate the friction that comes from managing a large number of devices. Using ManageXR significantly reduces time spent manually updating applications, and brings more visibility to the ENGAGE content and virtual space that powers the OptimaEd school experience. Beyond content management, ManageXR captures metrics like time spent in VR, unique content usage data, and device health metrics to provide deeper insights into the value VR is providing. ENGAGE is able to see that OptimaEd is finding immense value in its content reflected by the time spent in VR analytics the ManageXR platform provided. OptimaEd uses ManageXR analytics to shape future curriculum based on current usage information. ManageXR, ENGAGE, and OptimaEd are trailblazing what it means to build an XR ecosystem where content creators, organizations, and headsets manufacturers can come together to find integrated solutions for their industry and use cases.
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