BSI Solutions
NEVR
Novel Education in Virtual Reality
Novel Education in Virtual Reality (NEVR) is an interactive, fully immersive platform that uses the power of virtual reality for education and training from the classroom. This innovative concept in educational technology provides students and teachers stand-alone Virtual Reality headsets that enables them to enter the classroom from anywhere.
Why It's Needed
As schools across the nation navigate the new distance learning challenge created by the Covid-19 pandemic, innovative technologies are needed to ensure that children’s educational experience is protected and enhanced. The gamification of education also helps increase retention and engagement from students. In addition, virtual reality has many existing applications and is demonstrated to be the next evolution of global work team collaboration.
Benefits
- Allows students and teachers to socially interact in a simulated “real classroom” while being remote and safe
- The 4 C’s of learning enhanced: Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity
- Fewer distractions & increased engagement with custom teacher classroom controls
- Increased emotional connection to classroom content with unimagined virtual school field trips and experiences
- Ability to create searchable classroom recordings for disciplinary needs and lesson recaps for absent students
- Lowering limitations for students with disabilities
How It Works
Virtual Immersion
To create complete virtual immersion, students and teachers are provided with virtual reality headsets and hand controls. After putting on the lightweight equipment, users are presented with visual, auditory and tactile cues as they interact with the virtual environment. As this transition occurs, the user’s perception begins to shift, making the virtual environment feel like the real one. Users become fully immersed until the headset is removed.
Design
Participating schools would first identify which classes would be best suited for a virtual offering for lectures. Each teacher selected would then work with a BSI Solutions software developer to identify how they would prefer for their classes to look and function within virtual reality. Students and teachers would be able to design and create their own avatars to use while in the virtual environment. Unique experiences such as virtual field trips would also be created.
4 C's of Learning
Critical thinking is enhanced in a virtual reality environment by relating curriculum to experiences that allow students to ask questions and make connections to real-world problems. Communication is improved in virtual reality by enabling students to practice soft skills in a controlled environment. Collaboration barriers such as distance are removed since classroom experience can be accessed from anywhere. Creativity is fostered with quality content and learning opportunities not limited by physical and budgetary constraints.
Corporate Partners
BSI Solutions relies on partnerships to aid in making the NEVR platform available to as many school districts as possible. Our ever-growing list of organizations that we work with include the Goodwill, Department of Veterans Affairs, Duke Energy, Ally Bank and many more. While we have many established partners at the corporate, state and federal levels we are always searching for added relationships looking to give back to students.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, or would like to donate to support program funding click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
While there is a cost associated with NEVR, we work with each school district to determine ways to source funding for implementation. Our dedicated grant specialists, through grants and sponsorships, can help fill the gaps from a fiduciary perspective. Through the Covid-19 response, multiple States were granted funding from the Rethink K-12 grant for innovative technology solutions to meet the remote learning challenge.