Reflection

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This was my first group project in the MET program, and stakes were high, as this project would account for 25% of our mark in the course. Two of us were in Ontario, Canada, and one of us was in Switzerland, and we collaborated using Google Docs and Slack. This OER was an intense labour of research, collaboration, and effort to construct a meaningful learning experience for our colleagues. It was exciting to come together as a group to brainstorm and share our individual findings to be able to create this forecast the topic of VR/AR in education. Though there is massive educational and learning potential for XR technologies, there are not widespread educational uses across industry and education, but there are several use cases in fields such as health care and research that demonstrate the educational value of XR that can be applied in other contexts. Because XR technologies are largely untried and untested in K-12 and postsecondary contexts, we needed to find information outside of academic research and look to industry and management consultancy firms such as PwC, Deloitte, and McKinsey & Co, and read their research and white papers. Discovering these incredible and invaluable sources of information early in the program helped me research emerging technologies in other courses.

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This is the second website I created in the program, but the first created specifically for the purposes of creating an online learning environment that allowed its users opportunities to interact with one another. This allowed me to explore tools that can be embedded in websites to encourage interaction such as Thinglink, H5P, and Padlet. Because our site audience was primarily our own classmates but extended to a global audience, we wanted to create a more open way for people to participate that required the least amount of clicks or sign ups to encourage more people to interact with our learning environment. There are many  considerations to make to encourage participation when building learning environments within websites. With each project I am a part of that chooses this route, I am always trying to expand the range of tools we can use to facilitate communication, interaction, participation, and contributions to make the experience more social-constructivist, social-cognitivist, and constructivist.