On 16 and 17 December 2021, the third transnational project meeting of the Erasmus+ Project JANUS “e-Pedagogy and Virtual Reality Based Robotic Blended Education” took place at the University of Turku campus. Representatives of partner organisations from Greece, Poland, Italy, and Lithuania participated in the meeting.
The meeting was kicked off by Professor Mikko-Jussi Laakso, Director of the Centre for Learning Analytics, who welcomed the participants and gave a presentation about the transformation of the education system with the aid of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining practices. Following the the introductory speech, the meeting participants demonstrated their progress and brainstormed ideas for the enhancement of the bespoke Blended Learning scenarios.
The representatives from the Vilnius University presented in greater detail the key elements of the Educational Framework which guides the instructional decisions that need to be made in the context of the project. The proposed theoretical model can be adopted by educators and instructional designers associated with engineering disciplines to improve their Blended Learning practices.
The course leaders from the pilot universities (Technical Universities of Turin, Rzeszów University of Technology) presented and elaborated on the intended Learning Objectives as well as the educational and technical merits that the integration of the proposed Hybrid Virtual Learning model brings to students’ theoretical and conceptual understanding. The presentation was complemented by a demonstration provided by the representatives from SynArea Consultants on the functionality and the capabilities of the Virtual Reality educational platform.
Following the demonstration, the University of Ioannina representative gave a presentation on the custom Application Programming Interface which connects the Virtual Reality platform with the Learning Analytics server.
The presentations were concluded with the representative of the University of Turku communicating the evaluation plan timeline as well as the proposed data collection methods and procedures that the project partners need to follow.
The persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic makes the necessity to identify and propose innovative instructional solutions more pressing than ever. The actions related to the JANUS project can greatly influence educators’ approaches to Blended Learning activities and further pave the way for the introduction of more inclusive approaches even when the students are present at the physical university context.
JANUS Project Partnership:
- Ignacy Łukasiewicz Rzeszow University of Technology, Poland
- University of Turku, Finland
- University of Ioannina, Greece
- Politecnico di Torino, Italy
- SynArea Consultants s.r.l., Italy
- Vilnius University, Lithuania
Photos: JANUS project