Recently, Avantis Education, a provider of immersive education solutions, entered into a partnership with ICESCO. This collaboration will pilot using Avantis’ ClassVR product in four Islamic member states.
Alistair Hayward, Avantis Education’s Chief Revenue Officer, spoke exclusively with XR Today to explore the ICESCO partnership and the firm’s broader worldwide expansion.
Hayward said:
The ISECO partnership is pivotal to the adoption of this technology across the Muslim world. It’s a big investment for both organizations. We’re determined to make it extremely exciting for the students and successful enough that it actually goes into a policy where STEM is a requirement, immersive learning is a requirement, and VR is the chosen technology.
The partnership was announced during the ICESCO Ministerial Conference in Oman, which took place from October 2nd to 3rd. The initiative officially launched following the event.
The recent ICESCO/Avantis partnership represents how XR technology can assist in democratising worldwide education and access to personalised learning and digital learning tools.
Hayward added:
The basic view of VR as a tool is what it can deliver where the other methods or technologies either can’t deliver or don’t deliver. There’s a PWC research paper, which states that students using VR are four times more likely to retain knowledge and over 2.7 times more confident in applying learning. So, just as a technology to actually engage students it’s becoming recognized as a real winner.
Creating Valuable, Scalable XR Learning for ICESCO Regions
According to Hayward, ICESCO aims to leverage the Avantis partnership to “supplement other teaching, to supplement other investments in education technology, or to be used where education technology isn’t available because our product can be used offline as well.”
“What we’re working on is the higher level stuff,” remarked Hayward, “which is more strategic, articulating at a governmental NGO level that investing in XR technology will be better than if you don’t because we got students willing to use the technology; being excited about it.”
Hayward also added:
We do a number of projects in which excluded students use Avantis technology to fill that learning gap.
The ICESCO projects cover various key education segments crucial to a region’s economic development, such as STEM learning in areas like Uzbekistan, “which is a country very much based on textiles, so a textiles-based economy, how do they improve the skills levels of their students to broaden and to improve their GDP?”
The Avantis Education and the ICESCO partnership aims to implement immersive learning solutions over a 21-week program, including student training, teacher professional development, and impact analysis deliverables.
At the “strategic level, it’s about education, it’s about impact, it’s about proving that you can drive better levels of engagement and emotional reaction from the students,” Hayward remarked.
“Any XR product has to be very easy to adopt, has to be very quick to adopt in the classroom because if it takes too long to set products up, you’ve lost a teacher, and you’ve lost the students certainly,” explained Hayward.
Worldwide Scale and Content Delivery
Other considerations also exist in education spaces for XR and all kinds of applicable digital solutions, such as Safeguarding, which is “unbelievably important,” notes Hayward.
Speaking on Avantis’ approach to student safety, Hayward added:
We anonymize the names of any students using our products, and we don’t we don’t use student data. So, there were no issues there with our platform.
During the ISTELive event in Denver earlier this year, Avantis Education unveiled new ClassVR software and content enhancements. The company also shared best practices for using XR solutions, featuring U.S. education ambassadors and highlighting Avantis’s significant year of growth.
Further considerations include creating and distributing suitable learning content and assets that a teacher can quickly deploy across a student group,
Avantis aims to create an easy-to-use portal of roughly 300,000 immersive learning assets. Hayward explained, “It’s a very rounded solution as opposed to getting headsets from one vendor, MDM from another, and content from somewhere else because the chances of getting that up and running very quickly in a classroom with different components are more challenging than if you’ve got an integrated solution.”
Avantis Education’s goal is to provide an engaging service that allows teachers to take students on virtual field trips using these enhanced integrations.
The company is also expanding its product line to reach new students and regions. Earlier this year, Avantis introduced its Eduverse products to the St. Vrain Valley Schools, a school district in Colorado. This partnership granted all 60 schools in the district access to Eduverse’s library of immersive VR and AR services. The new VR solution was integrated promptly after the announcement. Eduverse was also added to the district’s ClassLink platform, allowing teachers to access the content with a single sign-on password and simplifying the process for new users.
In closing, Hayward explained, “Avantis has partners in 80 countries who’ve sold into over 90 countries, and we’ve got 300 partners supporting our product in their marketplaces. So we have scaled significantly, 14,000 schools. 200,000 classrooms, 2 million students, and a quarter million devices plus. So we are scaling very quickly.”
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