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You dare plowing through immersive learning environments. The jungle surrounds you and entices you, but also hampers your progress. Suddenly, activities you deemed plain are out of reach, like practicing team sports, while exotic ones are readily available, like visiting the molecular structure of materials. Relentlessly, you plow on, trusting your trail of experience to support your safe return, but the jungle overgrows it rapidly: your plans meet unexpected circumstances, like connectivity issues, lack of situational awareness, or sheer inadequacy to new realities: why assess by quizzing or milestones when we are immersed in situational evidence, for instance? In this talk, I will address two main questions and provide examples and pathways to address them, by sharing my previous efforts on this regard:

  • How can immersive environments expand the range of educational dynamics and subjects that online learning can provide?
  • How can we have widespread deployment of immersive environments?

Initially, I will present an overview on the multifaceted concept of immersion, a phenomenon emerging from the combination of presence within a system, and psychological absorption by narratives and agency. A panorama of current uses, practices, and strategies of immersive learning environments will be provided, and two approaches for the main questions will be provided: the concept and use of virtual choreographies for semantic-based deployment and recording of immersive content, and the Inven!RA architecture for mapping analytics from immersive environments to learning objectives in plans.

Short bio

Leonel Morgado is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Portuguese Open University, where he lectures on research methods and software development. His research is developed at the independent research unit INESC TEC, as a Senior Researcher in the HumanISE centre. He is also Secretary of the Assembly of the Portuguese Society of Videogame Sciences, and board member and Vice-President for Scientific Quality of the international research association, Immersive Learning Research Network. His main research interest is the use and development of immersive environments as tools for learning and business, which he has been pursuing for over 20 years. He authored over 200 research papers, led 7 research projects and participated in 13 more. Before pursuing an academic career, he was business and technical manager of an hardware import, distribution, and retail company, terminologist for the localization teams of MS Office 97 and Oracle InterOffice, language quality specialist for IBM/Lotus, a coordinator of Web-development and software-deployment teams, and manager of a cooperative extension team fighting the digital divide in rural villages. His hobbies are hiking, playing Portuguese guitar and trombone, and at the turn of the century was a volunteer firefighter for 6 years.

More information:https://www2.uab.pt/departamentos/DCT/detaildocente.php?doc=132