Two years ago, there was a seismic shift in higher education with the adoption of hybrid learning to ensure access to college courses during the pandemic. But colleges and universities are going beyond hybrid learning and diving into the metaverse. In this week’s news roundup with explore how hybrid learning laid the foundations for learning in the metaverse and how colleges and universities are putting this novel technology to work.
Read on to learn more.
Hybrid Learning Lays the Foundation for the Metaverse
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic most colleges and universities had scant experience with online and hybrid learning. But, like most organizations, they moved rapidly to adapt in order to support student learning during the first waves of the pandemic. While a few colleges and universities saw this as a temporary measure until they could return to “normal”, some embraced the opportunity and used it to embark on a broader transformation.
According to Matt Lawson, NetApp’s Director of Solutions Engineering, “Institutions aligning with this approach are using this opportunity to completely transform” and “charge ahead and answer some of the fundamental issues that pervaded education before the pandemic.”
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Iowa Company Builds VR Classrooms
Despite its virtues and opportunities, traditional online learning isn’t without its drawbacks. From the physical isolation to a lack of meaningful intellectual collaboration many students and professors struggle with online learning. To this end an Iowa-based company, VictoryXR, has begun to build virtual classrooms for colleges and universities. Morehouse College was one of the early adopters of technology, which allowed students and professors to be virtually on campus, interacting in classrooms, labs, and hallways as they had done in person.
With the success of the Morehouse College program, Meta – the parent company of Facebook – partnered with VictoryXR to award half million-dollar grants to 10 universities, along with VR goggles, to create what are being called metaversities.
The full story from the Kansas Reflector can be accessed here.
Move Over 5G, the University of Michigan Deploys the First 6E Network
Most localities and organizations have just begun to get access to 5G and with it an unparalleled opportunity to deploy transformational tools and technologies. But the University of Michigan has gone one step further to deploy the first 6E wireless network. University of Michigan CIO, Ravi Pendse, shared that the motivation behind the project was to “build a transformational network that allows our researchers to do the work they need to do, to move the information at the highest possible speeds that they can, [and] to provide them with ubiquitous bandwidth.” How did the University of Michigan build the use case and deliver on the promise? Emily Bamforth explains in this article from EdScoop.
