Tag: Virtual

  • 7 new and engaging virtual field trips

    7 new and engaging virtual field trips

    Key points:

    Virtual field trips have emerged as an engaging resource, offering students immersive experiences and allowing them to explore global landmarks, museums, and natural wonders without leaving their classrooms.​

    Virtual field trips connect students to places that, due to funding, geography, or other logistical challenges, they may not otherwise have a chance to visit or experience.

    These trips promote active engagement, critical thinking, and cater to diverse learning styles. For instance, students can virtually visit the Great Wall of China or delve into the depths of the ocean, fostering a deeper understanding of subjects ranging from history to science.

    If you’re looking for a new virtual field trip to bring to your classroom, here are a few to investigate:

    Giant Panda Cam at the Smithsonian National Zoo: Watch Bao Li and Qing Bao–the two new Giant Pandas at Smithsonian’s National Zoo–as they explore their indoor and outdoor habitats at the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat. The Giant Panda Cam is live from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET daily. After 7 p.m., the cam feed will switch to a pre-recorded view of the last 12 hours.  

    The Superpower of Story: A Virtual Field Trip to Warner Bros. Studios: Students will go behind the scenes on an exclusive virtual field trip to DC Comics headquarters at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California!.They’ll step into the world of legendary superheroes and blockbuster films, uncovering the secrets of how stories evolve from bold ideas to iconic comics to jaw-dropping live-action spectacles on the big screen. Along the way, they’ll hear from the creative minds who shape the DC Universe and get an insider’s look at the magic that brings their favorite characters to life.

    Mount Vernon: Students can enter different buildings and click on highlighted items or areas for explanations about their significance or what they were used for.

    Arctic Adventures: Polar Bears at Play Virtual Field Trip: Do polar bears play? The LEGO Group’s sustainability team, Polar Bears International, and Discovery Education travel to Churchill Manitoba and the Polar Frontier habitat at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in search of polar bears at play. Students will meet polar bears and play experts and uncover how arctic animals use play to learn just like humans, while inspiring students to use their voice to change their planet for the better.

    The Manhattan Project: Join The National WWII Museum for a cross-country virtual expedition to discover the science, sites, and stories of the creation of the atomic bomb. Student reporters examine the revolutionary science of nuclear energy in the Museum’s exhibits and the race to produce an atomic weapon in complete secrecy. 

    The Anne Frank House in VR: Explore the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family in virtual reality using the Anne Frank House VR app. The app provides a very special view into the Secret Annex where Anne Frank and the seven other people hid during WWII. In the VR app, all of the rooms in the Secret Annex are furnished according to how it was when occupied by the group in hiding, between 1942 and 1944. 

    Night Navigators: Build for Bats Virtual Field Trip: Join Discovery Education, the LEGO Group’s Social Responsibility Team, and Bat Conservation International as we travel across Texas and Florida in search of bat habitats. Students will meet play experts as they explore how these nighttime pollinators use play to learn and discover the critical role of bats in protecting farmers’ crops from pests and what we can do to help bats thrive.

    Laura Ascione
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  • ASU’s Required Virtual Reality Lab Boosted Grades, Retention

    ASU’s Required Virtual Reality Lab Boosted Grades, Retention

    Two years after Arizona State University replaced all of its introductory biology labs with virtual reality labs, the university’s rising tide of STEM majors are getting better overall grades and persisting longer in their programs, according to the results of a longitudinal study released Monday.

    Education-technology experts say the white paper from ASU’s EdPlus Action Lab affirms the university’s recent investment in virtual reality education and shows how virtual reality can be an effective tool to nurture complex reasoning skills in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Additionally, the research indicates that virtual learning could help narrowing historic achievement and workforce gaps in the STEM fields.

    “They’re not just executing recipe-like science labs—they’re in the immersive world exploring and working through expertly designed lab assignments that connect to the VR story,” said Annie Hale, executive director at the EdPlus Action Lab and lead author of the paper. “And that’s leading to real, measurable gains in learning and persistence in STEM.”

    Since fall 2022, aspiring scientists, doctors, engineers and other STEM majors at ASU have been required to pair their Bio 181 and Bio 182 lectures with a series of 15-minute virtual reality lab sessions in a 3-D intergalactic wildlife sanctuary, where dinosaur-like creatures are on the brink of extinction. Students create field scientist avatars and traverse the virtual world to collect samples and data before returning to the classroom to analyze their findings and use real-world biological principles to save the creatures.

    When ASU first piloted the course in spring 2022, a randomized study of about 500 students showed virtual reality’s initial promise in alleviating the historically high attrition rates—especially for low-income, female and nonwhite students—in introductory STEM classes that have long plagued ASU and universities nationwide. Students in the virtual reality lab group were 1.7 times more likely to score between 90 percent and 100 percent on their lab assignments compared to students in the conventional lab group.

    While those results indicated early success of the concept, some experts told Inside Higher Ed at the time that they were interested in seeing long-term outcomes before categorizing it as a “settled piece of pedagogy.”

    Hale had a similar idea.

    “After we saw great results from that trial, I wondered if it was just a semester effect,” she said. “Pedagogical adjustments can boost ABC rates and student satisfaction, but it doesn’t always have long-term implications.”

    To answer that question, Hale and her research team developed a two-year longitudinal study that tracked more than 4,000 students’ learning outcomes in the two-course introductory biology lab sequence between fall 2022—when ASU began requiring all STEM majors to take the virtual reality biology labs—and spring 2024.

    They found that students who took the virtual reality biology lab, on average, improved their final course mark by one-quarter of a grade between Bio 181 and Bio 182. Compared to students who took those two courses between 2018 and 2022—prior to the introduction of virtual reality—students in the virtual reality cohort also scored one-quarter of a letter grade higher in advanced biology courses, including general and molecular genetics.

    Results of the study also showed that students who took the virtual reality lab were more likely than their peers to remain STEM majors, and that they consistently performed well on all lab assignments regardless of their high school preparation levels, income, race, ethnicity or gender.

    Researchers also conducted pre- and post-class student surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to inform their findings, which revealed strong and lasting emotional investment in the high-stakes narrative of saving the creatures in the intergalactic wildlife sanctuary.

    “Students come out crying because the story line is so interesting and engaging,” Hale said. “In a world where science curriculum can be boring, hard or a lot of math, the [story] motivates them when the quantitative aspects are challenging. They want to solve it because they want to know what happens next.”

    ‘Ability to Feel Successful’

    Virtual reality has a decades-old presence in the education-technology world, but educators often deploy it tangentially, through one-time experiences that aren’t critical to passing a particular course. Although some of those efforts have yielded anecdotal and small-scale evidence that virtual reality can boost student engagement, the latest data on the technology’s incorporation into biology labs offers more robust, large-scale proof that ASU’s broader investments in virtual reality education are already paying off.

    In 2020, the university partnered with the technology and entertainment company Dreamscape Immersive—a virtual reality company with ties to notable Hollywood productions, such as WarGames and Men in Black—to create Dreamscape Learn. Over the past five years, the company has developed numerous virtual reality courses for ASU and more than a dozen other K-12 and higher education institutions across numerous disciplines, including art history, chemistry and astronomy.

    But ASU’s traditional introductory biology courses were among Dreamscape Learn’s first endeavors, as it aligned with the university’s push to broaden participation in STEM fields.

    Numerous studies have identified such courses as some of the biggest barriers to completing a STEM degree and landing a well-paying job, especially for students who didn’t complete a rigorous biology course in high school.

    In typical biology labs, “students are asked to design experiments and hypotheses, but they haven’t actually been taught the skills to do that,” said John VandenBrooks, a zoology professor and ASU’s associate dean of immersive learning, who helped design the virtual reality labs. “For students who come in with a strong background, that’s easier for them to engage with. But other students who haven’t had that same experience really struggle … They feel behind already.”

    Leveling the playing field through novel problem-solving is what motivated him to ground the curriculum in a fictional universe.

    “Nobody has solved the problems in the intergalactic wildlife sanctuary,” VandenBrooks said. “It gives them a foundation and the ability to feel successful early on in their higher education career and be able to continue on.”

    Making ‘Meaning Out of Complexity’

    But virtual reality isn’t about making these fundamental STEM courses any less rigorous, but rather teaching students transferable critical thinking skills, those involved with the courses say.

    “One of the advantages of making these fictional narratives is that we can develop the story in such a way so that students have to deploy very specific skills at a very specific time to solve that problem,” VandenBrooks said. “That creates a very clear learning progression that goes across this entire curriculum and that really benefits students in their skill development versus giving them a series of labs or assignments that are related but don’t necessarily have as clear of a progression.”

    And having those complex reasoning skills are what the droves of STEM majors who want to work in the medical field, for instance, will need to succeed in their careers.

    “The key to being a good doctor is knowing what’s abnormal in the normal,” said VandenBrooks, who previously worked at Midwestern University, a private medical school with locations in Arizona and Illinois. “When things are easy, you can use an algorithm, but when things aren’t, you have to do all of this problem-solving. That’s the doctor you want when things are really going wrong, and that’s what we’re trying to train students for.”

    Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at the education graduate school, who did not participate in any aspect of ASU’s study, said education research can benefit from studies with large sample sizes to affirm prior studies on virtual reality in education.

    In general, immersive learning experiences “reduce barriers to people believing they can succeed in the realm of science,” he said. “If you’re someone who’s been told your whole life that you don’t fit the mold of a typical scientist—because of your income, race, gender or ethnicity—VR provides learners the agency to see themselves as scientists.”

    Although the study demonstrates how that theory is already at work in ASU’s virtual reality biology labs, it may not be a feasible approach for every college and university.

    According to Josh Reibel, CEO of Dreamscape Learn, implementing the virtual reality education system (which includes software fees and the one-time costs of installing an immersive classroom called a pod) costs “mid–five figures to low six figures,” depending on the size of the school and the scale of the curricular offerings.

    In March 2022, The Arizona Republic reported that ASU had at that point invested $5 million in “philanthropic investment for development” to build out a virtual reality biology lab.

    If an institution can afford it, virtual reality also offers a strategy for teaching students to think beyond memorization and regurgitations in the age of generative artificial intelligence.

    “The more you can use AI to transmit facts, the more pressure there is on higher education to do more than just transmit facts,” Reibel said. “That helps educators see that the real problem to be solved isn’t how to populate students’ notebooks with more information, it’s how to get them to lean in to wanting to do more work.”

    Chris Dede, a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and a learning technology expert, said that though the gains presented in ASU’s study are relatively “modest,” they are “significant” nonetheless.

    “It’s showing that it’s reasonable to develop other things based on similar approaches,” he said. “If humans are trained simply on knowing a bunch of facts and doing well on psychometric tests, they’re going to lose to AI in the workplace, because they’re doing what AI does well rather than what people do well.”

    And what people do well, he said, “is make meaning out of complexity by pulling together different things they know about the world and developing hypotheses about what’s going on in the environment, which is not something AI can do, because it doesn’t understand the world.”

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  • Florida Virtual School Partners with University of Florida and Concord Consortium to Launch ‘Artificial Intelligence in Math’ Online Certification for Middle, High School Students 

    Florida Virtual School Partners with University of Florida and Concord Consortium to Launch ‘Artificial Intelligence in Math’ Online Certification for Middle, High School Students 

    ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is partnering with the University of Florida (UF) and the Concord Consortium to introduce a groundbreaking year-long “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Math” supplemental certification for FLVS middle and high school students enrolled in the school’s Flex option. FLVS instructors who teach Algebra 1 will lead this innovative program, teaching the online courses while also supplementing students’ learning with activities that build students’ understanding of math and AI concepts. FLVS students enrolled in Algebra 1 who elect to earn the certification will begin April 7. 

    The certification will introduce students to the foundational principles of AI that intersect with core math topics while offering insights into real-world applications, ethical considerations, and career opportunities in AI-related fields. By merging 21st-century technology with education, the program aims to boost students’ math skills, cultivate positive attitudes toward mathematics, and expose them to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

    “As a leader in online education for more than 27 years, Florida Virtual School is committed to being at the forefront of educational innovation,” said Dr. Louis Algaze, president and CEO of Florida Virtual School. “By partnering with the University of Florida and the Concord Consortium, we are equipping our students with essential math skills and the knowledge to navigate and succeed in an AI-enhanced world.”

    The certification also includes a collaborative feedback loop between FLVS teachers and UF and Concord Consortium researchers. Teachers will provide critical insights into the online course structure and student outcomes, helping to refine and improve the certification’s effectiveness for future online learners.

    “AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, creating new opportunities,” said Jie Chao, project director at the Concord Consortium. “Our partnership with FLVS allows us to offer robust AI learning opportunities to students with limited access to such resources, bridging the educational gaps and preparing young people for an AI-powered future.”

    FLVS teachers will also complete 40 hours of online professional development as part of the program. The training will include learning about specialized learning technologies designed to help visualize abstract math concepts and create interactive AI model explorations to ensure students engage with the AI development process in meaningful and dynamic ways.

    FLVS Flex students who are either currently enrolled or are interested in taking Algebra 1 can now sign up for the “AI in Math” certification by filling out this survey. Students who complete the program as part of their FLVS math class will receive enrichment credit and the AI Literacy certificate issued by UF and the Concord Consortium.  

    About Florida Virtual School (FLVS) 

    At Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the student is at the center of every decision we make. For 27 years, our certified online teachers have worked one-on-one with students to understand their needs and ensure their success – with FLVS students completing 8.1 million semester courses since the school’s inception. As a fully accredited statewide public school district, Florida students in grades Kindergarten through 12 can enroll tuition-free in full-time and part-time online education options. With more than 200 effective and comprehensive courses, and over 80 fun and exciting clubs, FLVS provides families with a safe, reliable, and flexible education in a supportive environment. As a leading online education provider, FLVS also offers comprehensive digital learning solutions to school districts, from online courses that result in high student performance outcomes, to easy-to-use online platforms, staff training, and support. To learn more, visit  our website.

    eSchool News Staff
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  • A virtual reality, AI-boosted system helps students with autism improve social skills

    A virtual reality, AI-boosted system helps students with autism improve social skills

    Key points:

    This article and the accompanying image originally appeared on the KU News site and are reposted here with permission.

    For more than a decade, University of Kansas researchers have been developing a virtual reality system to help students with disabilities, especially those with autism spectrum disorder, to learn, practice and improve social skills they need in a typical school day. Now, the KU research team has secured funding to add artificial intelligence components to the system to give those students an extended reality, or XR, experience to sharpen social interactions in a more natural setting.

    The U.S. Office of Special Education Programs has awarded a five-year, $2.5 million grant to researchers within KU’s School of Education & Human Sciences to develop Increasing Knowledge and Natural Opportunities With Social Emotional Competence, or iKNOW. The system will build on previous work and provide students and teachers with an immersive, authentic experience blending extended reality and real-world elements of artificial intelligence.

    iKNOW will expand the capabilities of VOISS, Virtual reality Opportunity to Integrate Social Skills, a KU-developed VR system that has proven successful and statistically valid in helping students with disabilities improve social skills. That system contains 140 unique learning scenarios meant to teach knowledge and understanding of 183 social skills in virtual school environments such as a classroom, hallway, cafeteria or bus that students and teachers can use via multiple platforms such as iPad, Chromebooks or Oculus VR headsets. The system also helps students use social skills such as receptive or expressive communication across multiple environments, not simply in the isolation of a classroom.

    IKNOW will combine the VR aspects of VOISS with AI features such as large language models to enhance the systems’ capabilities and allow more natural interactions than listening to prerecorded narratives and responding by pushing buttons. The new system will allow user-initiated speaking responses that can accurately transcribe spoken language in real-time. AI technology of iKNOW will also be able to generate appropriate video responses to avatars students interact with, audio analysis of user responses, integration of in-time images and graphics with instruction to boost students’ contextual understanding.

    “Avatars in iKNOW can have certain reactions and behaviors based on what we want them to do. They can model the practices we want students to see,” said Amber Rowland, assistant research professor in the Center for Research on Learning, part of KU’s Life Span Institute and one of the grant’s co principal investigators. “The system will harness AI to make sure students have more natural interactions and put them in the role of the ‘human in the loop’ by allowing them to speak, and it will respond like a normal conversation.”

    The spoken responses will not only be more natural and relatable to everyday situations, but the contextual understanding cues will help students better know why a certain response is preferred. Rowland said when students were presented with multiple choices in previous versions, they often would know which answer was correct but indicated that’s not how they would have responded in real life.

    IKNOW will also provide a real-time student progress monitoring system, telling them, educators and families how long students spoke, how frequently they spoke, number of keywords used, where students may have struggled in the system and other data to help enhance understanding.

    All avatar voices that iKNOW users encounter are provided by real middle school students, educators and administrators. This helps enhance the natural environment of the system without the shortcomings of students practicing social skills with classmates in supervised sessions. For example, users do not have to worry what the people they are practicing with are thinking about them while they are learning. They can practice the social skills that they need until they are comfortable moving from the XR environment to real life.

    “It will leverage our ability to take something off of teachers’ plates and provide tools for students to learn these skills in multiple environments. Right now, the closest we can come to that is training peers. But that puts students with disabilities in a different box by saying, ‘You don’t know how to do this,’” said Maggie Mosher, assistant research professor in KU’s Achievement & Assessment Institute, a co-principal investigator for the grant.

    Mosher, a KU graduate who completed her doctoral dissertation comparing VOISS to other social skills interventions, found the system was statistically significant and valid in improving social skills and knowledge across multiple domains. Her study, which also found the system to be acceptable, appropriate and feasible, was published in high-impact journals Computers & Education and Issues and Trends in Learning Technologies.

    The grant supporting iKNOW is one of four OSEP Innovation and Development grants intended to spur innovation in educational technology. The research team, including principal investigator Sean Smith, professor of special education; Amber Rowland, associate research professor in the Center for Research on Learning and the Achievement & Assessment Institute; Maggie Mosher, assistant research professor in AAI; and Bruce Frey, professor in educational psychology, will present their work on the project at the annual I/ITSEC conference, the world’s largest modeling, simulation and training event. It is sponsored by the National Training & Simulation Association, which promotes international and interdisciplinary cooperation within the fields of modeling and simulation, training, education and analysis and is affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association.

    The research team has implemented VOISS, available on the Apple Store and Google Play, at schools across the country. Anyone interested in learning more can find information, demonstrations and videos at the iKNOW site and can contact developers to use the system at the site’s “work with us” page.

    IKNOW will add resources for teachers and families who want to implement the system at a website called iKNOW TOOLS (Teaching Occasions and Opportunities for Learning Supports) to support generalization of social skills across real-world settings.

    “By combining our research-based social emotional virtual reality work (VOISS) with the increasing power and flexibility of AI, iKNOW will further personalize the learning experience for individuals with disabilities along with the struggling classmates,” Smith said. “Our hope and expectation is that iKNOW will further engage students to develop the essential social emotional skills to then apply in the real world to improve their overall learning outcomes.”

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  • Online Teaching Challenges Using Virtual Classroom Software

    Online Teaching Challenges Using Virtual Classroom Software

    What is a virtual classroom software?

    A virtual classroom is a digital replica of a traditional classroom, the only difference is that it uses technical tools to interact with students in real-time. The virtual classroom software for teachers helps higher education institutions to manage classes remotely using interactive tools for collaboration, brainstorming, ideation, and discussion. All this is followed by instant assessments and result publications to measure the learning that happened in the session.

     

    The sudden school closures and the need of Virtual classroom software for teachers

    There can never be a PAUSE mode for Education nor Learning. But what if a situation demands it? Let’s take the example of our current COVID-19 scenario.

    The UNESCO states that globally, over 1.3 billion children are out of the classroom, across 186 countries, as on March 2020.

     

     

    There are schools and universities closures everywhere, forcing educational institutions to look for an option to deal with the crisis.

    Thanks to the distinctive rise in the online teaching environment and virtual classroom software, what we could now call the only future of higher education and universities.

    Even the traditional universities and higher eds that were once tabooed to using online teaching are now racing to adapt their programmes and classes to online alternatives. The situation may be pressing, but retorting to any technology wouldn’t help.

    An intuitive, high-end, modern, virtual classroom software for teachers would serve the purpose—a tool that acts as a bridge to offering uninterrupted teaching/learning even during the difficult times.

    Creatrix Campus is end-to-end higher education software that brings campus online on-the-go. You could plan online exams, assignments, execute tasks, conduct online quizzes, group discussions, polling, all virtually.

    Creatrix Campus virtual campus management system has always helped faculty indulge in successful ways of teaching, revolutionizing digital education.

    There’s data analysis, visualization, forecast of assessments that predict learning outcomes, personalized learning pathways for students, and much more. We have figured out 12 successful ways by which Creatrix facilitates successful online teaching and learning, virtually. Here are they;

     

    How to Create an Engaging Virtual Classroom Environment with Virtual classroom software for teachers

     

    top-ways-to-teach-online-with-virtual-classroom-software

     

    1. Get scheduled first

    Now, this is a great feature to start an online classroom—setting up schedules and a set of predefined rules.

    Faculty are allowed to create schedules that most suits their online sessions. Creatrix Scheduling allows schedule creation based on faculty and student preferences.

    Multiple class schedules could be created for different time periods with options to add, edit or cancel schedules, and assign student groups, all this without conflicts.

    There’s enough flexibility here. While any new and complicated topic can be scheduled up in the forenoon, the rest can make up for the afternoon session. Achieving a balanced timetable schedule is also possible with faculty management software that will accommodate all changes instantly and meet your criteria.

     

    2. Build a course and student community

    The next crucial step in virtual teaching lies in the creation of a course and student community. The faculty is the moderator and the courses she creates are the community. On logging in, the faculty would see the list of batches he handles on her personal dashboard.

    The act of the faculty clicking on a particular batch is alike to the real-life scenario of getting into a classroom, with the bunch of students waiting to be marked attendance, hear their performance reports, and submission of assignments, etc. Before the class commences, the faculty marks attendance of the day.

    Nothing goes lacking in this sort of online teaching. Faculty plans well ahead of the classes with a solid curriculum management system from Creatrix.

    The faculty strategically adapt to the industry trends as well as the unique needs of the students. There’s enough option to track the daily progress of the students in line with the curriculum.

     

    3. Digitize the course contents

    At Creatrix we know the real purpose of a virtual LMS; we make learning enjoyable, accessible, and meaningful to students, improving their learning outcomes.

    The faculty takes control of the class, adding course materials to suit her course’s plan. Creatrix virtual Learning Management System (LMS) is brings in a lot of tools for applying various learning models in a wide range of digital formats.

    Instructors are allowed to create, upload, the course’s content, back it up with videos and files, deliver them to students, assign tasks and assessments, administer and track their progress, followed by record-keeping. There’s complete transparency on all these processes.

    The topic planned and covered are kept track of and those that need attention are extended for longer hours. The simplified workflows in Creatrix helps to focus students by giving constructive feedback and personalized recommendations.

     

    4. Adopt collaborative tools to maximize participation

    Virtual teaching is successful only when there’s maximum student participation. Creatrix has many collaborative and communication tools to keep the students glued to the actual teaching process.

    Creatrix virtual LMS allows students to team up on live sessions and video conferencing through external integrated tool.

    Faculty can put forward techniques including quizzes, debates, interactive discussions, etc. There are options to share additional resources for any topic by uploading videos, share relevant PDFs, PPTs, website links, etc. The sessions could be made more fun by bringing in polling, surveys, and map each topic with learning outcomes.

     

    benefits-of-digitizing-course-contents-using-virtual-LMS

     

    Creatrix Campus’s Virtual LMS comes with adaptive teaching models like blended learning, self-paced learning, collaborative learning, and flipped learning to arouse student participation. The lesson planner option in Creatrix helps users to plan and execute both physical and virtual classes for the same course.

     

    5. Focus on keeping the students engaged

    Online remote classes at any cost should be made interesting, mainly because the faculty-student is not in direct interaction. Classes hence have to be delivered in such a way that it builds engagement for learning.

    Creatrix has the Digital Whiteboard tools which come with a virtual pointer to facilitate brainstorming activities. In addition, there are discussion forums and messaging, which is another way of keeping students engaged. 

    Just like how Quora, Yahoo Answers, and Reddit act as amazing discussion forums, Creatrix LMS does the same. 

    The activity wall acts as a message board for further collaboration; students get to post doubtful questions, create polls, and share documents with faculty and his peers.

    There are enough ways a faculty could add advantage to online teaching by sharing learning videos, texts, podcasts to students.

     

    6. Introduce self-learning techniques

    Not all courses in the syllabus would call for a synchronous way of teaching. Some subject’s objectives maybe just research and self-learning. Creatrix virtual LMS creates a self-learning environment that gives enough room for real-time student engagement and self-reflection.

    On completion of topics, student take up auto-assigned, online assessments and quizzes that are used to track their understanding level on the current topic. Uploading videos related to the topic expands the learners to self-learn.

    The progress the student makes can be seen in their personalized dashboards on their real-time status bar reports displaying current, past, and future course progresses, along with the tasks due.

    The faculty’s journey is similar to a facilitator who provides relevant resources and course materials, create tutorials, short lessons, all made possible through online course repositories.

    Students could take part in live streaming and self-paced learning (video upload), conveniently accessible from a single point.

     

    7. Centralize the communication efforts

    There should be an organized way of communication keeping both the students and their parents/guardians informed about the teaching happening.

    This allows the stakeholders to stay informed with auto-notified alerts and reminders about deadlines on assignment submission, feedback, as well as missed topics. They get real-time status via email, SMS, and push notifications.

     

    8. Customize the testing and assessments for personalized learning outcome

    This is an unmissable feature in any online teaching. Assessments help to gauge the learner’s proficiency. Customizing them is incidentally what most software systems lack.

    With customized assessments, faculty have the option to personalize tests for students with different attainment levels. This gives the option to focus on weaker students in a much better way.

    Creatrix has options to conduct both online and offline Assessments/assignments in the form of quizzes, MCQs, long papers, articles, followed by instant onscreen evaluation. Based on the learning outcomes mapping, the system would then intimate the students attainment levels, individually.

      

    9. Get gamified

    A good online teaching platform should work on making things simple for the learners. They won’t really enjoy teaching that’s monotonous, after all, their eyes are starring the digital devices all day long.

    Pick out elements of game playing to add spice to your teaching. Students look for such a twist in their learning experience.

    Assign tasks and projects online, track the submission rates, and provide them badges or scores.

    Integrate with the course schedule and bring forth activity-based learning in line with the Curriculum. This will help instructors and students track topics better. Students, on the other hand, will have access to course information times during absenteeism. Wouldn’t that be great?

     

    10. Link to Incidents Tracking

    There are also options to deal with tardy behavior. Online teaching doesn’t mean you have to compromise on bad behavior incidents, students cheating during online exams by conducting online proctoring etc. A university management software with conduct management system make sense here.

     

    link-to-incidents-tracking

     

    Instantly parents get notified in real-time via email, SMS alerts, and push notifications.
    Besides capturing incidents, rules could be configured, discipline letters created, referrals initiated, analyze trends, and generate reports for faster decision-making to resolve behavior problems.

     

    11. Reporting

    With real-time reporting, instructors should be able to generate real-time reports, right in their hand. They get to know the stand of their students and work on their continuous improvement gradually.

    The instructor could track those students who are accessing the course content and who isn’t.

    Creatrix classroom management software is capable of generating real-time reports including students’ demographics, assignments, attendance, assignments, fee payments, grades, discipline incidents, coursework, assignments, etc.

    All these reports from the virtual classroom software help at deriving insights into learning for a bigger picture of the institutional reporting.

    The best thing about using Creatrix Online LMS is student’s progress data is right in their hands. They have the ability to track their own progress, their dips and ups with the progress status bar on their personal dashboard.

    They get to view the current, past, and future course progresses, along with the tasks due.

     

    12. Mobile support, 24*7

    Wrap up all the above-mentioned features into an all-time accessible mobile app!  A mobile tool is a necessity to support students with uninterrupted learning these days.

    Creatrix Online Learning Management System (OLMS) gives any time, anywhere access to learning where students team up for live sessions via mobile devices and tablets.

    They get the feel of in-the-classroom training with options to view the session’s content visually and communicate via text chat and audio; they can submit assignments, view grades & course materials, and interact with each other just the way they would do in the real classroom.

     

    Conclusion

    It’s high time we try and reset higher education learning to meet the present 2020 demands by giving uninterrupted online learning.

    A virtual classroom software for teachers is the call of the day; a tool like Creatrix Campus is sure to break the shackle that disrupts the flow of higher education by waking up to a better tomorrow.

    Let the higher education institutions get into virtual learning mode and blend with technology for incessant learning even during a crisis like Covid-19 and beyond. Connect with team Creatrix Campus to learn more about virtual classroom software for teachers!

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  • Online Presence for Academics Attending Virtual Events

    Online Presence for Academics Attending Virtual Events

    I love virtual events. Maybe you do too. But it’s okay if you don’t. As my guest on The Social Academic, Dr. Julia Barzyk said, “research is becoming virtual first.” Virtual events are here to stay when it comes to academics and researchers.

    Your online presence can enhance how you experience and interact with people at conferences and events. This is true for both in person and virtual events. But today, I want to chat with you about what to do for your online presence when you’re attending or presenting virtually. In this blog post:

    Tell people you’re attending the virtual conference or event

    Sometimes, professors hesitate to tell people you’re going to a conference or event because it feels self-promotional. 

    But, actually, when you share you’re headed to an event (even when it’s virtual), you help a lot of people. You can help your

    • Colleagues
    • Students
    • event organizers
    • Speakers

    There are also people who are anxious to join the conversation. Conference attendees sometimes wait for someone, anyone else to use the conference hashtag on social media first. I get that. It can be hard to start a conversation.

    When you think about the people you have the potential to help? Thinking about those people helps the time I’ve put into crafting a post be a lot more meaningful. My professor clients have found that’s true for them too.

    Here are a few places you can share you’re headed to a virtual event:

    • Social media
    • Your website
    • Mentioning in person

    Tip: The most dynamic way you can improve your online presence and your presence at any event you’re presenting at is by improving your speaker bio.

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    Watch my video on speaker bios with Dr. Echo Rivera

    Share about the specific talks you’re presenting or attending

    View over the shoulder of a professor who is attending a live virtual event. On his open laptop screen is the speaker, a person with short hair and glasses, smiling.

    When you share the talk you’re presenting specifically, it helps people know if they can attend. If they can attend (or even if they can’t), it helps people share the event with others who may be interested. Like their grad students.

    Sometimes conference programs are hundreds of pages and multiple days, with concurrent sessions to choose from. I love that virtual events tend to come with options to plan your schedule in advance.

    Let’s say you share your talk on social media too. And, you use the conference hashtag. Only a small percentage of the people presenting are using the conference hashtags (or posting about their talk at all). Already it’s more likely you’ll get eyes on your event.

    When you share the details people need to know if the talk is right for them, things like

    • What your session is about
    • The time and date you’re presenting at
    • Where people can find more info

    It makes a huge difference for people to have ease when learning about your particular event. Some professors make a graphic on Canva, but virtual events tend to create graphics for you. So it’s a good idea to log into the conference platform early to see if there’s a visual way for you to enhance your social media post about your talk. It’s also worth asking the conference hosts if that’s something they plan on having to avoid unnecessary labor (unless you love graphic design, in which case yay!).

    I’ve also worked with a lot of professors who host or moderate events. Sometimes they have multiple events and presentations at the same conference over several days. There’s an inclination to not share their own thing, so it’s okay if you find comfort in sharing the thing you’re hosting instead. It makes a big difference for the panelists or speakers at your event.

    The truth is, people often wait to share about themselves until the last minute (if they ever do). I think that’s often because of either imposter syndrome or time. As a host, you care about this. And you can help make it easy for the speakers at your event to share with ease when you tag them. It’s much easier to repost than to craft it themselves.

    Tips for your social media post reach the right people

    • Use the conference hashtag using #CamelCase where you capitalize the first letters of each word
    • Use up to 1 other hashtag related to your field at the end of your post
    • Tag the event organizer or conference host
    • Tag the speakers

    Visit Accessible Social from Alexa Heinrich for best practices for writing accessible social media posts.

    When you have a link where people can learn more info about your talk or event, please know that most social media algorithms downgrade how many people it shows your post to when you include a link in your post. When you have a link to share, one way to do that is by including the link in the comments or replies of your post. For Twitter/X, you can include the link in a thread.

    Here’s more on sharing your talk or conference presentation on social media.

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    Connecting with speakers and attendees virtually 

    A bright room where a woman sits at a table with papers. She's holding an small mug in her hands and is smiling at the red mobile phone in her hands.

    At virtual events, connecting with people in ways that are lasting can actually be easier. That’s because virtual events have virtual platforms where you can have a profile, get a link to click on to find someone’s social media or website, or download their slides/resources. Virtual events may have networking sessions, pre or post events, and ways for you to stay involved.

    Most virtual events have a space for you to create a profile. Your profile helps people see you and get to know who you are. And when you update your profile early (like when access to them opens), you give people opportunity to learn about you as they’re updating their own profile.

    One way to connect with people in advance is by adding an invitation in your bio. For example:

    • Adding a scheduling link and inviting people to meet you for coffee
    • Adding your email and inviting people to contact you if they are interesting in collaborating or networking

    Some conferences have space for you to create your own virtual event (like a hangout with a shared topic of conversation).

    There are also asynchronous ways to feel like you’re part of the community. For instance, the option to ask a Question to all attendees, or to create a poll. Some virtual conferences have games you can participate in. Or a scavenger hunt.

    I love that virtual events can often create better environments to communicate with speakers as compared to in person conferences. When you’re in person, you have what, 10 minutes before your next session starts? Virtual allows for asynchronous options, giving you opportunity to ask questions to speakers before their session (even when you can’t make it live). There’s even space for speakers to upload resources and share links for you to take home.

    When their session has ended, the chat space often stays so people can engage in conversations when watching the replay. And actually, don’t wait for someone else to do it first. If you’re at a virtual even and you see that no one has said anything in the chat (after the event has ended), you can start by thanking the speaker. You can build meaningful relationships with people virtually even when you don’t have a specific conversation or feel unsure of what to say at the moment. Every relationship doesn’t need to be built on something “big” or “deep” or “collaborative.” Do what feels natural.

    Virtual events allow us to have more control, even when it comes to our schedule. I love the flexibility and accessibility they create for academics and researchers. And I know that for some people they’re maybe not your cup of tea. And that’s okay.

    Whether you prefer virtual or in person events, there are ways for you to connect with people in meaningful ways online. And there are ways you can have agency with your online presence to help the people at that conference better know who you are and what you care about.

    Looking for a great platform for your virtual event in HigherEd? Check out Forumm from my friends 448 Studio. Here’s my interview with founder, Dan Marrable.

    Your online presence is a great way to share your research, teaching, and academic life. To find collaborators and make lasting connections. And I want that for you, if it’s something you’re curious about for yourself.

    There are a lot of misconceptions about what your online presence should look like as a professor. And it stops people from feeling confident or comfortable showing up online, even when you know a strong online presence aligns with your goals.

    There are free resources to help you be intentional with your online presence on The Social Academic blog, podcast, and YouTube channel. This article is specifically about your online presence before, during, and after your talk or presentation.

    It’s also okay to want support from a partner who cares about you. Let’s chat about working together on your online presence as a professor or researcher.

    Subscribe to The Social Academic blog.

    The form above subscribes you to new posts published on The Social Academic blog.
    Want emails from Jennifer about building your online presence? Subscribe to her email list.
    Looking for the podcast? Subscribe on Spotify.
    Prefer to watch videos? Subscribe on YouTube.

    Guides and Advice Articles Online Presence How To’s Resources for Grad Students Share Your Research

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  • Three Virtual Offerings to Spark Joy and Encourage Self-Care This Valentine’s Day – CUPA-HR

    Three Virtual Offerings to Spark Joy and Encourage Self-Care This Valentine’s Day – CUPA-HR

    by Julie Burrell | February 13, 2024

    Even though it’s not mentioned in the job description, stress management is no doubt a daily part of your life in higher ed HR. Prioritizing well-being is also at the forefront of strategies to retain and recruit talent. CUPA-HR has found that 56% of higher ed employees are at least somewhat likely to look for a new position in the coming year, and the strongest predictors of retention are factors related to job satisfaction and well-being.

    You know that attentiveness to mental and physical health helps you and your team thrive, but it may be difficult to find the time and budget to make wellness a daily practice. This Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to treat yourself and your team to the gift of well-being by scheduling time to participate in Well-Being in Higher Education, a week-long virtual event. From February 26 to March 1, CUPA-HR will join with 20+ higher ed associations to help you deepen your knowledge of well-being on your campus and offer moments of connection across the higher ed community.

    CUPA-HR-sponsored sessions include:

    • An Integrated Approach to Fostering Workplace Well-Being
    • Managing Anxiety and Stress in the Workplace
    • Staff Well-Being: Its Role in Creating a Healthy Campus

    You may also want to check out these related CUPA-HR resources:

    Is saying “yes” your love language? Do you struggle to say no even when you don’t have the bandwidth? Learn how to say no with confidence in one of our most popular webinars of 2023, Managing Stress and Self-Care: “No” Is a Complete Sentence, which offers practical tools for minimizing stress and leads participants in creating a self-care plan.

    Help stave off burnout by practicing the skill of resilience. While it may seem like some people are naturally more resilient than others, resilience is a learned skill you can develop and practice in your work and personal life. Learn how in this webinar and accompanying Higher Ed HR Magazine article.



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  • I’ll be attending the virtual The PIE Live TNE & Tech event from March 22-26, 2021 #PIELive21

    I’ll be attending the virtual The PIE Live TNE & Tech event from March 22-26, 2021 #PIELive21

    I’m very excited to be attending the upcoming The PIE Live TNE & Tech event March 22-26, 2021.

    I’m a big fan of the work of our colleagues at The PIE News in advancing international education. Information and registration is available at https://thepielive.com/tneandtech/en/page/thepielive. If you are unable to attend The PIE Live you can follow the backchannel on Twitter via #PIELive21.


    Note: I received free registration for this event but I receive no other compensation.

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