Piloting digital pedagogy approach in metaverse

Vocational education with utilizing new technologies brings huge potential to expand usage of training environments beyond limits of physical locations both from time-spent to reach them and effectiveness point of view.Â

First training pilot round was taking place on October/November in two sessions. First session with  students in 6 groups having 3 person each and second session with individual students with same learning path was done bringing total of 33 participants for the first round.

In the Necoverse UC1 target is on Robot training and first training pilot is utilizing two pedagogical approaches namely participatory learning and hands-on learning to orientate students to speedup learning curve to operate actual real robot.

Three phases to observe

Phase One – orientation was done within the Finpeda FVS metaverse platform on a browser-based multiuser learning environment. Students were self guided to learn basics with video material and questions reflecting topics to be understood before moving to actual operational use of the robot.Â

Phase Two – operations was taking place once theory part was done and student was ready to use virtual robot environment in Turku UAS VR headset driven metaverse environment. Learning how to operte 3D digital twin model of the robot with accurate behaviours through VR headset brings safe environment to learn needed skills.

Phase Three – real action was taking student to actual robot lab and already virtually trained tasks were done with real robot to see how well orientation and operations practices was utilized in real life situation

The aim of the Necoverse project UC1 robot training pilot is to compare collaborative learning with individual learning using a combined approaches of Browser based and VR headset based environments and to refine those based on measured impacts and received feedback to make them effective and relevant.

First round of virtual training combined with hands-on in actual robot class was giving promising results of metaverse training potential. Enthusiasms and novelty was was already noticed e and for sure we got also plenty of ideas how to further enhance learning experiences

Collected feedback analysis

The UC1 pilot will continue with new trial rounds where we expand use of virtual environments step by step both on group based and self learning approaches. We are trilled of opportunity to measure and compare traditional and digital approaches with real life use case experiments.

We keep you posted!