Page 26 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

2017 CT IMPACT AWARDS IN DEPTH
and services in the digital age. Through the Global Learning Center, students not only experience advanced digital tech- nology routinely, they also become part of ORU’s entire global community of students who have access to educa- tional media and relevant services where and when they need them.
Faculty and staff use the AR/VR platform — with the digital concierge — to collaborate with peers and offer inno- vative, relevant, interactive content and services. “Our seam- less service and solutions — which harmoniously connect innovative teamwork and leading-edge technologies — are directly benefitting students,” said project lead and AVP for Innovation and Technology Michael Mathews.
Operating at scale, and with a need to establish services within an acceptable timeline, the center’s programs must draw on technologies that will support quick and reliable content creation and still promote innovation, experimentation and leadership. ORU chose vendor partners that could align with the university’s vision as well as its development needs.
The university created a supportive and flexible environment for change. Faculty and administrators can browse a library of existing interactive AR/VR lessons to incorporate into their courses, or they can create their own content from scratch. ORU selected the AR/VR software platform by EON Reality as the best fit. With EON’s cloud-based AR/VR platform, ORU can develop,
Officials estimate that an astonishing 93 billion data transactions are engaged throughout campus each semester through the Digital IT Concierge.
run, manage, access, store, host and distribute its AR/VR applications to a wide range of devices, from smartphones and holographic displays to ORU’s immersive three- dimensional VR room. Faculty and staff of all experience levels have used the platform to create knowledge transfer applications and build their development skills as desired. Academic planners observed that these educators have created more than half a million learning objects to date.
Finally, the most important element in the Global Learning Center’s success is delivering all of the newly developed content resources to their appropriate audiences. Planners partnered with rSmart to implement that company’s OneCampus product — a lightweight, cloud-based service that makes it easy for students to discover and access relevant information. Students query the university’s disparate resources and services via a simple, central interface known on campus as ORU’s Digital IT Concierge. The search-based system sits on top of existing business applications and connects users through ORU’s
authentication system. The OneCampus solution was deployed without disruption within the first 48 hours.
Now, through the digital concierge, students have access to all of ORU’s mobile and web-based campus services, including curricula, AR/VR lessons, academic calendars, events, advising and practical information such as campus maps and dining services. The Digital IT Concierge has become the center of knowledge transfer across campus. Officials estimate that an astonishing 93 billion data transactions are engaged throughout campus each semester through the digital concierge.
For the Global Learning Center, OneCampus is the crucial link that has helped to build a connected and global learning community that prospers from ORU’s advanced AR/VR resources. As Mathews reflected, “ORU is the first university to deploy an enterprise approach to augmented and virtual reality content that can be discovered and accessed by students globally through a cloud-based portal. By offering easy access to our Global Learning Center through the Digital IT Concierge, we can now provide students worldwide with full immersion into a digital world that includes many thousands of highly relevant learning objects.”
Meg Lloyd is a freelance writer based in Northern California.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018