1)    Mixed / Augmented Reality
 
I feel Mixed/Augmented reality could be very useful for new students in our college. I am currently doing a lot of work in relation to the induction period (between enrolment and first ‘proper’ classes). There are many opportunities to make this time more informative and fulfilling.

Although we do our best to cut down on jargon there are some difficulties. For example Student’s Association, Student Support and Admissions services mean something to us but not necessarily to a student who has set foot in the college for the first time.

I think it would be useful to provide some real time information on the student’s mobile device about the various services offered by each of these support areas, perhaps by providing a QR code in those areas of the College.

2)    Artificial intelligence

As highlighted in Alexander et al. (2019) I think the IU Boost (2019) for assessment product could be a useful model for our own purposes.

We already have our own API to send SMS messages to students from any of our own customised systems (intranet, learning environment). We could perhaps add a watch routine to selected Turnitin or Moodle assignments to automatically alert enrolled students if they have not submitted within a few days of the deadline.

I would obviously take this on advisement from the curriculum staff, some of whom prefer to send bulk class texts in advance of a deadline. It may save us some SMS money if we could send targeted texts to students who are leaving things late.

3)    Virtual Assistants

We have plans in our institution to design our own chatbots to improve the experience of finding a course on our college website. The current search space is laid out by subject area, method of attendance, mode of attendance, campus etc. This model assumes that the visitor already knows which of these parameters they should be focussed on.

It would be far better to engage conversationally to find out what the potential student would like to achieve. Questions to achieve this could be like “Are you interested in a practical course such as motor vehicle, hair dressing, joinery or would you prefer to study arts, computing or business skills?”.