COVID-19 situation has pushed all societies around the world to seek remote solutions that would allow citizens to resume their everyday activities maintaining physical social distancing. On the other hand, physical social distance has made (remote) social inclusion more necessary than ever, thus, introducing a new trend of systems that aid remote communication. We propose Classy, a platform that simulates a class with students and an instructor via 3D virtual environment, in which everyone will be able to interact with each other, a video-wall for the instructor to make presentations, pose quizes, share screen etc. The “classroom” is the starting place from where the operator-teacher will be able to transfer the class to virtual tours, with the option of VR glasses support, depending on the subject. For example, while talking about history, the classroom can be transformed to an actual battlefield to “eye-witness” Achilles taking the fatal arrow in his heel, take a space tour through the solar system or visit monumental buildings of the world in an eye-blink. One of the most important aspects of our proposal is its creative gamified character that will make the audience want to participate and play with it more and more, gaining “knowledge” points and outranking the rest of the users. Its audio-visual based nature will also help people with educational difficulties to better focus and learn by experiencing situations, rather than just for example read about them, and it would also play a big role for people with mobility issues, as they will now have equal access to lessons with everybody, being able to attend without having to move to a real classroom.
The goal of this project is to bring remote 3D guided lessons into the education. In particular, our initial objectives include the development of a platform that offers a novel, technically advanced and appealing e-learning method, offering better learning potentials by watching a virtual model rather than an image in a book or a conventional image of video in a screen. Our solution will offer numerous features appropriate for lessons, like group quizzes in gamified form, personal repository for videos, images etc as well as the option of attending custom-made classes with tours using VR glasses.
In order to fulfill our project’s ambitious goals, we have assembled an transnational consortium of four organizations that will complementarily cover all the project needs. More specifically, GeoImaging is a company that thrives in innovative project coordination, development and promotion. VIRTUAL is a technical partner specialized in virtual reality technology, having developed their own 3D environment on which we’ll base our idea and is already participating in numerous commercial partnerships. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, being the biggest University in Greece has the necessary means to conduct researches concerning user requirements and provide the project with a large amount of volunteer end-users who will be willing to try this newly developed application that will enable the students to participate in remote lessons. Likewise, SchooVR is an end-user company with big experience in exploiting virtual reality technologies and they will assist Classy user analysis and testing with a big variety of end-user volunteers of different backgrounds
Carrying out the project, we will use a deeply user-centered methodology. In the beginning we’ll make a detailed user-requirements analysis to better understand what the users would need from an e-learning platform. The findings of this research will provide the technical team the necessary information in order to begin with the software implementation. Preliminary results will be tested through mock-ups and the feedback will help the technical team to move on and prepare the first prototype of the platform. A workshop will be organized in order to introduce this new e-learning solution, and demonstrate the first prototype. Pilot testing will evaluate the results so far and the 2nd prototype will be developed according to the feedback received. Another workshop will follow 2nd prototype’s release, as well as the next pilot testing. The last modifications will lead to the final product at the end of the project, which will be presented and interested parties will be able to get some training on how to use it during our scheduled training event.
The core output of the project will be a web platform with which any educational entity will be able to perform remote classes of various subjects. Among the expected impacts are the scientific ground on which further similar solutions will be developed, a new ecosystem of stakeholders who will depend or increase their revenues via Classy and better educated public even when mobility impairments or social distancing issues exist. Lastly, the long-term benefits include audiences that are used to receiving remote education and utilize virtual reality technology
