In our AR-for-EU project, we organised and hosted from October 7-9, 2019, the Augmented Reality lecturer training, a three day event packed with everything necessary to teach AR software development to undergraduate and graduate students across Europe. 20 prospective AR lecturers from universities, companies, and other projects attended.
We started the workshop by introducing CodeReality, our Augmented Reality course, and the methodology we deployed in designing it. We shared our experience of piloting the course – 12 weeks of teaching action, design thinking and agile, and project supervision. We then proceeded with a hands-on workshop “AR app 101” to both demonstrate how CodeReality tutorials are designed and give the participants a chance to experience directly one tutorial. AR app 101 is one of our basics tutorials aiming to teach how to build the first Hololens / ARkit / ARcore app and we use it to demonstrate the full workflow from illustration, target creation, 3D modelling to AR experience on Hololens (or other AR devices) that can be created in 15mins and be taught over an hour. On the second day we proceeded with the CodeReality Unit Summaries – short presentations by the instructors who delivered the Augmented Reality lectures and workshops when they were taught as a block intensive training course in February 2019 (Course Module Augmented reality). We presented the selected 9 lectures and 9 tutorials, including the main content of the units, learning objectives, intended learning outcomes, resources, practical exercises, assessment recommendations and our lessons learnt.
In the afternoon of the second day, we first summarised findings from our CodeReality AR developer skills survey to then engage with the participants in a discussion over which AR skills they consider essential. We concluded day 2 with a panel discussion on the curriculum.
During the final day of the workshop, two important sessions were organized. We started with sharing the practical considerations for teaching the topic of Augmented Reality. The workshop concluded with an overview of the Augmented Reality open textbook. We presented this community initiative stared by CodeReality, demonstrated some of the chapters of the book, and gave instuctions on how to contribute. The participants were able to install the necessary book tools in an install party. With this AR open book we have set out to create the first comprehensive Open Educational Resource as a foundation for AR curricula in Higher Education.
The teacher training workshop was organized by a team from five European universities of the AR-FOR-EU project.