Field trips turned on their head
Professor Torbjørn Netland and his team (D-MTEC) have won the Bronze Award in the Virtual/Augmented Reality category of the 2020 Reimagine Education competition. Their project, FactoryVR, enables students to remotely explore production facilities.
Professor Torbjørn Netland holds the Chair in Production and Operations Management (POM) at ETH’s Department of Management, Technology, and Economics (D-MTEC). He and his team teach students how manufacturing plants work. To that end, they like to head off on field trips that allow students to experience the ins and outs of factories. But on-site visits are challenging to organise – and were even before the COVID-19 crisis. Access and security concerns, interrupted workflows, and all the organisational effort involved make field trips to production floors a complicated undertaking.
But what about the other way around? Netland and his team have upended the problem in a project titled “FactoryVR”. His team brought a Hilti tools factory to their students via the cloud. With their smartphones mounted on an inexpensive head rig, students can stroll through the production floors and experience a three-dimensional and immersive company visit (see video) – or they can enjoy the VR experience on a computer or tablet. The virtual reality (VR) environment prompts them with questions that test their knowledge, depending on where they are in the virtual factory. Much like in a computer game, the students can collect rewards as they move through the scenes.
FactoryVR has now won the Bronze Award in the Virtual/Augmented Reality category of the 2020 Reimagine Education competition, the world’s largest awards programme for innovative teaching. This year, over 1,500 applicants competed for the “Oscars of Education”. “We are very happy and surprised that we made it all the way to the podium,” says Netland. “The Silver and Gold winners in our category are big business already. Ours is perhaps simpler, but exceptionally scalable. While everyone in my team has a stake in the award, I would like to acknowledge in particular the work of Rafael Lorenz, Julian Senoner, Daniel Kwasnitschka, and Gian-Andrea Gottini who supported the implementation – and the continued backing of Erik Jentges, LET, and Innovedum. I would also like to thank the Hilti team for their fantastic support, and for welcoming us to their factory in Thüringen, Austria. We are co-creating a teaching innovation that will not only be useful in higher education, but will also help Hilti improve their internal training.” Netland’s team showcased their innovations at the virtual Reimagine Education Conference on 9–11 December 2020.
Funded by Innovedum, FactoryVR grew out of the “CaseVR” project, which won the Gianluca Spina Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation in 2018, and was shortlisted for the 2020 ETH KITE Award. In CaseVR, Netland’s team used open-access VR videos and apps. In FactoryVR, the team creates their own VR content in cooperation with industrial partners such as Hilti. While FactoryVR is already an integral part of the Chair’s Production and Operations Management course, Netland is busy planning the next steps: “Our positive experiences with FactoryVR and its scalability and cost-effectiveness point to a promising future for VR applications in business education.”
Reimagine Education
Reimagine Education is a global conference and competition hosted by QS, a leading global education network, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The Reimagine Education Awards reward innovative approaches that enhance student learning outcomes and employability.