The Virtual Classroom project is a teaching innovation from the School of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences & Leisure Management, Taylor's University that recently received a gold award at the International Innovative Competition on Languages, Education & Societies (IINNCOME 2022) on the theme of “Humanizing Learning, Teaching, and Societies in Digitalized Contexts''. The competition was organized by Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Perlis, Malaysia which was held virtually by getting all the presenters to submit a video on teaching innovation. The title of the submitted project by Taylor's University was "Immersive Role-playing Micro-teaching Activities for Teacher Trainees Using the Engage VR Platform". This event involved four categories of participant - professionals, teachers/lecturers, higher education students and secondary school students. The purpose of this competition was to provide a platform for educators and students to showcase their teaching innovation in new directions in language pedagogy and technology integration in language teaching and learning.
Taylor's School of Education won another award at the International University Carnival on E-Learning (IUCEL) 2022 which was organized and hosted virtually by the University Putra Malaysia in collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education and the Malaysian IPTA e-Learning Council (MEIPTA). The event received 439 entries from around the world to encourage and share best practices and global expertise in e-Learning at all levels of learning institutions. The team received a silver medal in the category of Invention, Innovation & Design on e-Learning (IIDEL). "Shaping Digital Ready Future Preservice Teachers with Virtual Reality Role-Playing Micro-Teaching Activities Using the Engage VR Platform," the project's title says.
Both projects aimed to promote Engage Virtual Reality (VR), an online Virtual Reality platform that provides an immersive virtual learning environment for teacher education programmes, particularly at Malaysian private higher learning institutions. The teaching innovation seeks to investigate the use of the Engage VR platform, which is the key technological enabler for achieving the goals of an immersive micro-teaching session that allows for life-like responsive engagements using avatars in a virtual environment.
Dr. P. Thivilojana S. Perinpasingam from School of Education led the both winning projects in collaboration with Dr. Charles Sharma Naidu and Mr. Faisal Athar Mohd Fadzil, the project team of Taylor's Virtual Online Future Technology and Extended Reality (VORTEX).