On Tuesday, October 1, the Wentworth community celebrated its inaugural Virtual Reality Day which took place in the CEIS Atrium.  The goal of Virtual Reality (VR) Day was to recognize and celebrate the current use of Virtual and Augmented reality to support teaching and learning at the institution.

Wentworth faculty from various disciplines including; Architecture, Humanities, Interior Design and Construction Management shared how they have incorporate VR and AR (Augmented Reality) technology into their course design.

Leading off the discussions, Professor Jody Gordon (Humanities) and Professor Ann-Catrin Schultz (Architecture) presentation titled, Augmenting Architectural History: Re-envisioning the Built Environment through Virtual Reality Pedagogy a Wentworth EPIC project aimed at introducing virtual reality technology into a series of classes in the fields of archaeology and architectural history.

Professors Gordon and Schultz indicated that a starting point for their project is the use of Rome Reborn (https://www.romereborn.org/), a VR application that provides digital reconstructions and virtual tours of ancient Rome during 320 C.E. in all its former glory.

“Currently, Rome Reborn has recreated a series of ancient Roman landscapes including: a flyover of the ancient city, the Forum, the Colosseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, and the Pantheon” said Professor Gordon.

Using the Oculus Go VR headset, students will experience ancient Roman landscapes in full 3-D virtual reality in order to learn about “monumentality, spatial analysis, architectural design, and placemaking” said Professor Gordon.

During, Professor Lynette Panarelli’s presentation, Integrating technology into the classroom: 3-D modeling and VR for Interior Design students at WIT, she shared how students in her course have incorporated VR technology into their final projects.

Professor Panarelli conveyed that “winning projects with VR technology is becoming the new ‘norm’ in many design firms”.  She went on to say that “designers, clients, and other stakeholders in building design and construction can have multidimensional, multi-sensory experiences long before the building is constructed.”

Currently, the WIT Interior Design department integrates Revit modeling software into the classroom so students can build the digital model and simulate the environment that they are designing. A student can use plugins such as Enscape and Lumion to create a walkthrough and QR codes to simulate a headset with a smart phone.

Professor Panarelli shared that “students who were exposed to VR technology on co-op return to campus and continue to use and develop those skills. It is our goal to provide more opportunities in the classroom to encourage students to integrate technology used in the industry with their foundation design skills”.

During Professor John Cribbs’ presentation, Using A/R to Introduce Civil Site Plans to CM Undergraduates, he discussed how he and his colleagues have incorporated augmented reality into their course design using the innovative AR Sandbox.

Professor Cribbs stated that the “introduction of this technology allowed students to overlay specific site topography from a digital site plan onto a physical sandbox in order to model and generate existing topographic conditions.”

Professor Cribbs went on to say that the students were “challenged with identifying the proposed site conditions from the civil engineering drawings, in order to resurface the sandbox to match these conditions.”

Professor Cribbs also shared the results of data that he has collected in his course demonstrating the significant impact that the AR Sandbox has played in helping increase student learning through the use of this technology.

Learning Innovation & Technology would like to express a sincere thank you to Professors Gordon, Shultz, Panarelli and Cribbs for their tremendous contributions to the success of VR Day.

In addition, we would also like to thank Michael D’Agostino, Lab Technician for his efforts in assembling the AR Sandbox for VR Day participants to experience; as well as Tory Lam, Assistant Director of Accelerate and members of the Douglas D. Schumann Library and Learning Commons for their contributions.

We would also like to express a heartfelt thank you to our colleagues at Suffolk University: Walter Johnson, Sean Solley and Jennifer Fuchel as well as members of the Multiple Realities team at Suffolk University for participating in VR Day and sharing their knowledge and expertise with us.  We look forward to building a positive, collaborative relationship with our colleagues from Suffolk University.

Wentworth Virtual Reality Day was co-sponsored by Learning Innovation & Technology and the Provost’s Office.  It is our hope to make VR Day and annual event to celebrate the growing and expanded use of AR, VR and other mixed reality technology to support teaching and learning at Wentworth.

Thank you all that participated in making the inaugural VR Day a success.

In planning to migrate from Lynda Learning to LinkedIn Learning, we identified content in Blackboard that instructors need to update for the links to continue to work. The report below lists much of the content in Blackboard from Lynda.com that we know will not redirect after the update. (Most links will redirect for at least 3 months and LIT will be reaching out later to assist with updating those links). Due to limititations of what we can search for Blackboard and the many ways in which instructors may have added Lynda content to Blackboard sites, there may be links we did not find. If you are copying courses, you should check all links to make sure you don’t have broken content.

Included in the report are the original Lynda.com link and the new LinkedIn link (scroll to the right to see the new link). You can search by instructor or course name to see if your course has content that needs immediate remediation. If you teach a CPCE course, you may want to search by course because the instructors listed are associated with the course in Blackboard but may not be the instructor of record.

NOTE: Fall 2019 courses will not be in this list due to the lead time require to have LinkedIn identify the replacement links. If you have copied courses you will need to check and remediate any links copied from courses on this list.

What Qwickly Attendance users need to know

When you are setting up Qwickly Attendance in your course, you no longer go to the course control panel. Instead, there is a menu item in the Build Content menu for Qwickly Attendance tool. Create a link to Qwickly Attendance with this new menu option in a content area, we suggest in the Student Read First section. Once link is created, click on it and it will work the way it did in the past.

Note: You may get a message about the tool needing to act as you, this is a necessary step so that you know that the tool will make changes to your grade center if you are enabling grading.

Revised Step by Step Qwickly Attendance Instructions.

Why has Qwickly Attendance changed?

During the break between Summer and Fall terms we have updated the Qwickly Attendance Tool to function through an LTI integration. Qwickly is changing how their suite of tools tools integrates with learning management system. The LTI (or Learning Tools Interoperability) standard allows cross-platform compatibility of tools to multiple learning management systems. In our experience, LTI’s tend to be less vulnerable to problems when the LMS is upgraded.