New Pub: Enhancing User Onboarding in Virtual Reality Educational Applications

New Pub: Enhancing User Onboarding in Virtual Reality Educational Applications

Multimodal Learning Analytics, Publication
Learning in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment can be a captivating and immersive experience for students. Despite the potential that VR has to help students learn in new and exciting ways, many students may also struggle during their initial interactions with a given VR environment. Whether or not effective user onboarding takes place can be the make or break of an application’s success. A new publication sheds light on this key challenge of effective onboarding by exploring how pre-training methods impact the onboarding experience in VR educational applications. 36 people, primarily university students, participated in a study to understand how different approaches affected their ability to navigate VR environments and their overall satisfaction. The findings show that pre-training helps users get an orientation and slightly boosts satisfaction, but it falls…
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Zhifan Sun Joins the Team

Zhifan Sun Joins the Team

Team
We happily announce that Zhifan Sun has joined the EduTec team as a PhD candidate. Zhifan will be working in the ML2MT project (From Machine Learning to Machine Teaching – Making Machines AND Humans Smarter). Zhifan has a Master of Science in speech and language processing from the University of Edinburgh. Before joining our team, he collected further academic experience as a research intern at the UKP Lab of the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research interests include Natural Language Processing (NLP), linguistics and applying NLP to educational technology. We look forward to working with you in the years to come. Welcome, Zhifan!
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Daniele Di Mitri Joins German UDS as Professor of Multimodal Learning Technologies

Daniele Di Mitri Joins German UDS as Professor of Multimodal Learning Technologies

Alumni, Job announcements, Team
As of April 1st, 2025, Daniele Di Mitri has taken on a new position as a Professor in Multimodal Learning Technologies at the German University of Digital Science (German UDS). This newly established private non-profit university, located in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany, is dedicated to pioneering digital education. In this role, Daniele will be setting up a new research group focused on multimodal learning technologies and coordinating the new master's program in Advanced Digital Realities. German UDS represents an innovative model in higher education, offering fully digital bachelor's, master's and MBA programs. Every course is delivered online, allowing students from anywhere in the world to access a German education through a flexible, MOOC-like structure that supports self-paced learning. This approach aims to redefine higher education by embracing digital transformation, reducing geographical…
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