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Tag: Simulation

NELE: February 2025

Published 28th February 2025

It’s the glorious return of NELE! The North East Learning Environments user group. Except, not really, because the first meeting of reformed NELE was in November, and I got a cold the day before and couldn’t go. NELE is the same group of folks as per ALT North East, but we have mutinied and left the umbrella of ALT, to become NELE once again, which it was before we partnered with ALT. Times change, organisations change, logos change, but the people and the purpose remain.

Today we talked a lot about ePortfolio systems, sharing our experiences of Mahara, both hosted and self-administered, PebblePad, and other bespoke solutions such as using OneNote and the NEE Pad solution for healthcare professionals in the region. The one area of consensus was that whatever solution you choose, take-up rates remain modest. At Sunderland, we’re looking at potentially replacing Mahara following disappointment with the Canvas integration, but after hearing what folks are paying for PebblePad, I don’t think we’ll be going down that route. Neither did OneNote come out of the discussion well, with people noting major problems with syncing and complications caused by multiple versions of the app, all looking and working a little differently.

The second topic of conversation was around digital accessibility and VLE threshold standards, and how to maintain a minimum level of quality. It’s interesting to see a few institutions are picking up on the idea of baseline standards of some kind, a topic we’ll come back to in a future meeting, as we’re doing some good work on this at Sunderland. I learned about Global Accessibility Awareness Day which is going to be on May 15th. That’s going to present a good opportunity to do some awareness work leading up to it.

After lunch we had a tour of Teesside’s new BIOS building for health sciences, which is where all of the photos come from today. They have an interactive room powered by Gener8, which is a lot like our Immersive Interactive room, but the technology has come along a bit. Projectors are low profile and flush to the ceiling, very inconspicuous, and there are infrared sensors all along the top of the walls to make the ‘touchscreen’ functionality work. We also had a look in their simulation suite, which includes a whole surgery room, and the microscopy lab was very impressive, with microscopes able to output to screens for everyone to see.

Finally, we had a discussion about note taking applications and approaches, commenting on how these kind of skills are not taught as part of course work, but only, at best, in optional study skills sessions usually run by the library. Some of the software we looked at included Obsidian and Notion.

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Immersive Interactive Demonstration

Published 10th July 2015

Attended a live demonstration of a fully interactive system from Immersive Interactive which our Faculty of Applied Sciences could be interested in purchasing. The system is designed to simulate as closely as possible any given scenario in a safe place. One of the examples they demonstrated was for paramedic training and included scenes set at accidents, inside an ambulance and then in a hospital. Our Faculty is interested in using it to simulate a pharmacy and other health related scenarios.

It works by using a combination of projectors, touch screens, Kinect sensor bars for motion control and voice recognition, surround sound speakers and a smoke / smell machine. It all runs off a fairly standard PC and a tablet for control. Anything can be projected onto the screens but 3600 video footage generates the best results and the system includes a 3600 camera made up of 6 GoPros for recording and creating your own scenarios. The pop-up demonstration here was limited to three three metre screens but when permanently installed in a room it can project onto all four walls and the floor, and can even be set up as rear-projection for a better effect, though this of course requires a lot of additional space.

I was fairly impressed by it, I can see a lot of potential in systems like this and, of course, the ultimate goal is a proper holodeck! It has the advantage over virtual reality systems like the Oculus Rift in that multiple people can be present in the room and it isn’t blocking out external reality completely (though that could be seen as a plus). In the short to medium term I think both approaches have their strengths and are worthy of development. Of course, none of the hardware used here is special and one of my colleagues thinks we could put something like this together ourselves, but getting it all to work together smoothly is the difficult bit and that is what Immersive Interactive provides – service and software. But it’s not cheap, and they are only just expanding into FE and HE now. Only six FE/HE institutions have purchased the system to date, with the oldest being installed around four months ago. So, no research yet into the impact and effectiveness which is what is really needed before making such a big commitment.

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