An experiential e-learning platform for developing students’ innovation abilities

An experiential e-learning platform for developing students’ innovation abilities

Abstract

Innovation is the key to economic development. It has always been our main task to nurture students’ creativity and innovation abilities in order to enhance their competitiveness in challenging environments.

This project proposes a practical and experiential teaching pedagogy that focuses on rich experiential and hands-on teaching and learning in an interactive and virtual learning environment. This experiential and hands-on pedagogy can inspire students’ enthusiasm to critically think, explore, learn, and adopt a broad of knowledge to design and develop methods for tackling problems and challenges in an innovative approach. Hence, the students’ critical thinking and innovation abilities can be nurtured and grown systematically.

An experiential e-learning platform has been built for developing students’ innovation abilities through self-and-experiential learning (SEL) in engineering design courses in the Faculty of Engineering using the Teaching Development Grant funding.  The e-learning platform integrates a set of advanced information and computing, 3D Hologram displays/devices, virtual reality (VR) and mobile devices with a suite of in-house developed applications for stereoscopic visualisation of virtual objects in an immersive virtual environment to facilitate systematic training and development of students’ innovative abilities through experiential learning.  It helps students understand what and how various knowledge and feasible technologies can be effectively integrated to create a feasible design/solution in a practical and innovative approach. As such, students are inspired with a stronger desire, self-initiative and enthusiasm for exploring their potential in innovative creations.

This seminar will introduce the features and functions of the experiential e-learning platform and demonstrate how to use the platform, apps, mixed reality and mobile devices for supporting experiential and hands-on teaching and learning. The seminar schedule is as follows: