Grant: College & Community Social Innovation Fund

PROJECT OVERVIEW: Challenges faced by Canadian students residing in northern and rural communities in accessing post-secondary vocational training are well documented, with the 15 to 30-year-old age cohort urgently needing a range of training options to prepare them for careers in their communities and beyond. Over the course of the pandemic, educators in northern communities identified an immediate and critical need for (i) more regional connection and partnerships with post-secondary institutions in southern Canada (ii) professional development for educators, and (iii) increased technological affordances to support northern and rural learners. Deployment of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) digital platforms, collectively known as eXtended Reality (XR) technologies, allow the learner to engage virtually with training environments and scenarios that might otherwise prove difficult to access. Using XR learning simulations expands the capacities of rural educators and learners and allows for threshold concepts to 'stick' with better learning retention. Further, the province of Ontario has invested heavily in the development of XR for post-secondary institutions, with a particular emphasis on bringing XR capacity and development to northern and rural communities. OBJECTIVES AND POTENTIAL FOR SOCIAL IMPACT: Using a social impact framework and a multi-stakeholder co-op model, the XR Learning Lab Partnership has four objectives (i) Connect northern and remote communities and post-secondary education organizations with the technology, software and professional development to teach with XR learning simulations across a range of vocational possibilities (ii) Conduct a needs assessment in collaboration with our organizational partners Contact North/Nord to determine where career training gaps exist that could be addressed effectively with XR learning simulations (iii) Develop and field test training and upskilling content for educators teaching with XR simulations (iv) Develop and pilot a Northern and Rural XR start-up program that incubates mobile and remote accelerator capacity to build the in-community talent pipeline for asset and content creation and delivery.