Page 6 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

INTERACTIVE LEARNING mary grush Learning Hands-on With Virtual/
Augmented Reality
Students at two geographically distant universities collaborate to explore cutting-edge technologies.
TECHNOLOGY SURROUNDS us, and so do questions about the readiness of our students to step into future job markets that have ever-increasing demands for technical competencies — particularly in emerging technologies. With that in mind, one faculty member at Bentley University (MA) considered ways that his students might best learn to create and use virtual and augmented reality. In particular, he designed a bold experiment with a partner school, Politehnica University of Timisoara (UPT) in Romania — in which the students would create and examine AR artifacts. In this learning collaboration, students from these two schools, on separate continents, learn about the technology and its real-word applications.
Here, Mark Frydenberg, a senior lecturer of computer and information systems and director of the CIS Sandbox at Bentley, details the project and the thinking behind it.
Campus Technology: What was the basic premise of the collaboration between your institution and the school in Romania?
Mark Frydenberg: In today’s global economy, many students will be entering a workforce where it is likely that they will need to collaborate with colleagues who may not ever meet in person to complete an assigned task. Our project creates a controlled learning environment where students work together over six to eight weeks, navigating issues of technology and time zones, to study a particular technology and share their results using various multimedia tools.
CT: What is the project called? How have the two institutions involved worked together?
Frydenberg: “TalkTech” is a continuing study that partners first-year students in my Introduction to Technology course at Bentley with seniors in a multimedia course at Politehnica University of Timisoara in Romania taught by my colleague, Professor Diana Andone. Both courses focus on developing digital literacy skills.
Diana and I have been pairing our students each fall semester for the past eight years. More than 1,000 students have participated over the years. They communicate and collaborate online, in the TalkTech project. About 35 students from Bentley and 50 from UPT participated in the fall 2016 semester, working in mixed groups of four or five.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017
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