Trainingscapes at the Future Education Trust for Leadership Summer Symposium

We were delighted to be invited by our client Bournemouth University to help showcase the work we are doing for them in VR training for midwives and nurses at the Future Education Trust for Leadership (FELT) Summer Symposium on "How technology will change teaching and education" held at the UK Parliament yesterday.

We'd rashly promised that we'd have Trainingscapes working on Oculus Quest for the event and we managed it, just! Denyse (left of picture, with Policy Connect CEO Jonathan Shaw trying the system out) brought BU's shiny new Quest and we brought 2 of our own (and a third turned up at the office today). Space-wise we only had two running in the end, but this is a far cry from the Rift demo's we've been doing as the Quests need minimal set-up, provide a stable environment, lots of good UI (showing real-world imagery whilst you define the guardian space and find the controllers) and all of a sudden VR is easy and you can afford to have multiple people try it at once!

Kneeling down to engage with a virtual 9 year old at eye-level

The content of the main symposium gave some interesting perspectives on technology in schools, FE and HE. Highlights for me were:

• Excellent chairing by Paralympian Lord Chris Holmes, and highlighting the ongoing need for assisstive technology, and including the best use of Peter Gabriel song (and album) titles ever
• Paul McKean from JISC providing a great future "day in the life" highlighting the role of tech, and also the fact that most tech mentioned is already in use somewhere (the old Gibson quote about the future is here already, its just not evenly distributed yet). Also some interesting thoughts on micro-credentials (mini/module-level qualifications) and how to aggregate those in the future.
• Maren Deepwell from ALT talking about how to make users of learning technology into critical users, so that they are aware of potential issues of bias from AI etc
• Deborah Millar from the Grimsby Institute of FE/HE talkign about their "Level Up" programme to upskill teachers in both LT and productivity and communications tools.
• Dick Palmer from TEN Group and FELTAG talking about how past visions haven't panned out (must look up the Learning 2020 one he mentioned), and the opportunities for new tech in the land-based industries (didn't have time to show him our virtual cows!)
• Interesting questions from the floor about personalisation of future LT, and the lack of skills in the current workforce and coming out of institutions in edutech learning design and authoring.

All in all a great day out!