The Near Future Teaching project held a recent event with the uCreate Studioin the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library.

uCreate Studio is the community’s makerspace with a host of facilities and technologies for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D Printing, CNC Milling, 3D Scanning, and more. Run by Mike Boyd, who led the session with us, it is a great facility and a very open, encouraging environment to turn ideas into virtual or material reality.

We were interested in using the uCreate Studio as an environment to stimulate thinking around the future of teaching at the University. By getting hands-on with kit, we wanted participants to think creatively about the future of the university and how teaching might change in years to come through access to material and maker technologies, spaces and pedagogies.

Mike introduced the space, discussing ideas that the makerspace has put into play: putting museums on display, new research in the analytics around the material elements of creation and product design, virtual educational tools, and product manufacturing. With that little bit of explanation, away we went.

Academic colleagues and PhD students from Medicine, Geosciences, Science and Technology Studies, Informatics and Psychology came along and spent the time playing with the kit, discussing how they might use them in teaching and recording a few vox pop interviews.

We toyed with Skanect to make 3D scans of humans; Sketchfab for exporting 3D scans to VR; Autodesk RECAP for reality capture. We learned about Thingiverse, a database of digital design; Cura, the printing software needed to make it all go. Easel: Inventables for 3D carving.

Ideas emerged for a range of potential applications in teaching: medical simulations with VR, actual surgery with AR, using 3D models and printing to explore law and intellectual property, creating bespoke research instruments for particular projects. Using 3D models to explore intricate anatomical structures and haptic systems to explore treatment and surgery in these high risk environments. VR and AR for exploring sympathy and empathy in psychology.

Ultimately, the question that we keep circling back on is how do these technologies create new teaching practices? How do they expand on our vision of what is possible at the University, in our disciplines, and across disciplines? Some spoke to new teaching practices, some to new research practices, some to new event and field learning activities. All spoke, at some level, to the value of curiosity in this process, to dig deeper, to learn more.

A few key takeaways were:

VR clearly has many applications in the classroom and for distance learning, but we need to be able to scale it up in an affordable way (Google cardboards for classes of 20+)

Kit is only a fairly small part of the issue: another one is simply time. How do we make time for academics and postgraduate teachers to use, adapt and develop curriculum which enagages some of these technologies for teaching?

Problem-based curricula and teaching methods are likely to really engage students by using 3D printing, scanning and milling to craft and materially express products and artefacts, so we might want to look at creative exploration of problem-based learning across disciplines for aspects of our future teaching.

VR and immersive methods for the teaching of, for example, psychology have clear uses but future teaching would need to carefully design for immersion and its potential emotional stresses and ethical nuances: again, kit is far from being the only issue to address here.

Maker spaces imply presence on campus, so what about distance learners? We can draw on projects like the OU’s Re:Form to understand how remotemanufacturing can help us educate by making at a distance.

We are delighted that our programme of events for Autumn 2017 is coming into focus. We will have many ways for you to engage with the project and share your thoughts about the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Keep an eye on our Events page for ways that you can take part in person, and add your thoughts, links, images, videos and ideas to our Near Future Teaching Community Padlet page. Come along to our Near Future Teaching Collider event:

And you can always find us on Facebook @NearFutureTeach and Twitter @NearFutureTeach, and use our hashtag #UoE_NFT to get in touch. If you missed it, you might also enjoy this round up of the brilliant Playful Learning Conference that took place in July, where we captured a number of vox pops which will be going up on our Video page soon:

Here is a recording of the workshop introduction, which was delivered by Dr Jon Turner, Director of the Institute for Academic Development and also by Sian, who gave us a run down of some of the technologies being tested today for use in future university classrooms. Keep your ears peeled for the technological interruption that tickled us during the intro!

Here is a video of Sian talking about face recognition software and its uses in the classroom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NllFzBCdj8&feature=youtu.be

Insights

We had fascinating conversations with the student workshop participants, who didn’t always answer our questions in the ways we would have expected. This is exactly what we are hoping for in this series of pilot workshops. We want our assumptions to be challenged, so that we get a sense of what students and staff really think about technology. Ultimately we aim to propose a vision of Edinburgh’s digital future that is person-led rather than technology-led.

Here are some of the insights we came away with after talking to our student workshop participants:

• Use a range of technologies to make the individual learning experience more flexible and tailored.
• With lecturers being recorded make it possible to place a digital bookmark or post it in your personal digital record of the lecture to go back to later.
• To have the potential to explore topics or ideas in more detail on the fly (accessing extra explanations or further information on specific topics as they come up in a lecture).
• To be able to use technology to make it possible to explore connections between different courses and course content, and to be able to switch back and forth between digging into a topic in more detail and zooming out to see its broader context.
• Very interesting discussion about the potential benefits of robot personal tutors. Efficient in being able to answer common questions, also less intimidating for students and may reduce inhibition linked to concern about appearing stupid.
• Some discussion about use of advanced visualisation (eg to explore topics in 3D, to see how things have changed through time, to explore the impact of changing parameters in experiments, equations etc)
• Continuing desire for personal contact with academics and teachers – but perhaps more as guides and mentors – than as didactic lecturers
• We want to go to lectures, we want real teachers! Still lecture capture is good for reviewing, but don’t make it accessible until after the live lecture. You build a relationship with your lecturer – there is an exchange, this is important.
• The facial expression technology could be dangerous, sometimes I look tired or bored even when I’m concentrating! And it could make the lecturer’s job really difficult, if they are looking at live negative feedback.
• We love the idea of knowing how busy the library is before we even get there, saves us a wasted journey.
• We come to university to have our first taste of independence, and if we’re always watched and tracked we’ll never know what it is to be free.
• Before first year, it would be great to have an AI who could answer our ‘frequently asked questions’, so we don’t feel stupid, and also to have chat rooms where we can learn from current students.
• Everything feels so modern nowadays, I just want everything to be normal and to get on with it. (1st year student)
• I hope the University doesn’t look too different in 2030 because this is Edinburgh and it is beautiful!
• Some future ideas: option to Skype tutors, online classes, greater eBook resources, individual eBook tablets in the library, giant plasma screens around the University like Times Square

Thanks for thinking about the future with us!

Jennifer Williams, Institute for Academic Development