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When Virtual Reality reinvents Training: The Cnam Bet with CAP’VR
For three decades, the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts has been incorporating digital technology into its pedagogical practices. Building on this experience, the CAP’VR (Chemistry Agri-food Pharma Virtual Reality) immersive Digital Twin has been developed to enhance Teaching through Virtual Reality (VR). This innovative device offers a digital laboratory twin that enables learners to acquaint themselves with professional gestures, technical processes, and safety practices, while optimizing training time. The CAP’VR system has been meticulously designed to cater to a diverse audience, particularly those engaged in retraining or work-study programs, by offering progressive, interactive modules in domains such as food processing, chemistry, and process engineering. The system integrates safe learning and skills assessment, ensuring a comprehensive and secure educational experience. The content is meticulously developed based on interactive scenarios adapted from real lab-life situations, ranging from laboratory safety to everyday experiments. The learning process is structured into three levels, providing a structured and progressive learning path. The development of the system was based on a multidisciplinary collaboration between teachers, instructional engineers, and VR developers, ensuring coherence between pedagogical and technical objectives. The impact on learners is significant, boosting their confidence, commitment, and memorization. Concurrently, CAP’VR is effecting a transformation in the practices of teachers, who assume the role of Experience Facilitators. Notwithstanding the deployment of this immersive technology posing technical, financial, and organizational challenges, CAP’VR paves the way for innovative, personalized teaching approaches.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
Quand la Réalité Virtuelle Réinvente la Formation Continue : Le Pari du Cnam avec CAP’VR
Depuis près de trente ans, le Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Cnam) intègre le numérique dans ses pratiques pédagogiques. Fort de cette expérience, le jumeau numérique immersif CAP’VR (Chimie Agro Pharma Virtual Reality) a été développé pour enrichir l’enseignement grâce à la réalité virtuelle. Ce dispositif innovant propose un jumeau numérique de laboratoire permettant aux apprenants de se familiariser avec des gestes métiers, des processus techniques, et des pratiques de sécurité, tout en optimisant les temps de formation. Conçu pour s’adresser à un public varié, CAP’VR propose des modules progressifs et interactifs dans des domaines tels que l’agroalimentaire, la chimie ou le génie des procédés, combinant l’apprentissage sécurisé et l’évaluation des compétences. Le contenu repose sur des scénarios immersifs adaptés, allant de la sécurité en laboratoire aux manipulations courantes, avec un apprentissage structuré en trois niveaux. Le développement du dispositif s’est appuyé sur une collaboration multidisciplinaire entre enseignants, ingénieurs pédagogiques et développeurs, favorisant la cohérence des objectifs pédagogiques et techniques. L’impact sur les apprenants est notable, renforçant leur confiance, leur engagement et leur mémorisation. Parallèlement, CAP’VR transforme les pratiques des enseignants, qui évoluent vers un rôle de facilitateurs d’expériences. Bien que le déploiement de cette technologie immersive pose des défis techniques, financiers et organisationnels, CAP’VR ouvre la voie à des approches pédagogiques novatrices et personnalisées.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
The challenges of implementing accessibility in a virtual reality digital twin of a chemistry laboratory
Designing a virtual reality digital twin for learning in a chemistry laboratory requires a balance between educational objectives, immersion, user-friendliness, accessibility and an immersive experience. This is the challenge that the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers has been working on for the past four years. A11yVR Conference 2024
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
Implementing an Accessible Virtual Twin for Learning in Virtual Reality
Equal Entry Article on Mimbus Chemistry by Le Cnam. Virtual reality is a powerful teaching medium. VR can offer a more visceral experience than traditional screen-based media. In a sense, it gives the user a sense of skill and, in many cases, it has an emotional amplifier and a memory of the experience. It taps another brain region, the live experience region of the brain.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
Improving accessibility to Immersive Learning courses
In September 2023, France Immersive Learning published a guide to immersive technologies with a view to demystifying them and making them easier to understand for anyone who wants to discover, test and understand them. The association and its members firmly believe in the added value of these technologies in the learning process thanks to their engaging nature. The logical next step in this work to highlight the uses of immersive technologies is to examine their accessibility for people with disabilities. Accessibility is an essential issue and a societal challenge that goes beyond Immersive Learning, supported in particular by Agefiph, one of its founding members.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
Enriching the educational experience: accessibility of virtual reality teaching modules for inclusive chemistry education
At the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam), virtual reality (VR) has revolutionised the teaching of chemistry and related disciplines by offering immersive, interactive learning experiences. The teaching modules developed as part of the Chimie Agro Pharma (CAP'VR) project have paved the way for immersive learning experiences that allow learners to explore complex chemical concepts in a visual and interactive way. However, for these tools to be truly effective, they must be accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Recent legal provisions have made this aspect crucial not only from an educational point of view, but also mandatory, with financial penalties for non-compliance. This article describes the approaches used in the CAP'VR project to make VR educational modules accessible to students with disabilities, illustrating our commitment to inclusive education.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
CAP’VR: a collaborative project to develop immersive practical work sessions
The use of new immersive technologies is revolutionising the way we teach. As a result, teaching practices are evolving to incorporate these technological tools, particularly in continuing professional development and adult education, where the CNAM is a major player in the higher education landscape. CAP'VR (‘Chimie Agro Pharma Virtual Reality’) has enabled the development of a virtual laboratory and immersive modules on safety and common procedures, demonstrating the accessibility of these tools in higher education. CAP'VR is a unifying project based on the dynamism and synergy between teacher-researchers, educational engineers and technicians, and socio-economic partners, Mimbus and the France Immersive Learning Lab task force. Immersive virtual reality modules are currently distributed throughout the Paris region, and around a hundred people have already discovered this project at IT trade shows. This article presents the creation of the CAP'VR team, the development of the various immersive modules, and gives an example of an educational sequence developed as part of the project.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
XR Success in Vocational Training: The Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers Case Study
Recent advancements in hardware and software tools, especially around consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) headsets, have led to innovative and successful use cases of extended reality (XR) technologies in both higher education and the professional world. In 2018, leaders at Le Cnam discovered and became excited about these opportunities for the future of XR in both education and work and spearheaded the development of XR for student learning in France. When Le Cnam leadership officially recognized this work in 2019, professional learner access to and use of VR devices became formally integrated into the institution's larger strategic planning and goals. In the years since, Le Cnam has continued to lead the way with funding and support for VR at the institution, as exemplified in what has been its most successful project to date—the creation of student training VR modules using a "digital twin" of a chemistry lab on campus.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
The Accessibility Tree, a uPortal Case Study
The accessibility tree enables modern assistive technologies to understand web pages. We will explore how the accessibility tree is constructed, how it is interpreted by assistive technologies, and how to build web pages to maximise the potential of assistive technologies. We will use real examples from uPortal to demonstrate the process. This presentation will go beyond simple, dry accessibility rules, delving into what it takes to create an inclusive semantic experience for the user.
Read more → by Christian Cousquer
Portal? uPortal?! What is this bechamel?
This presentation should have been entitled ‘Portals, uPortal - a discourse on method’, but as that title was already taken, it is called "Portal? uPortal!? What on earth is this nonsense?"... Which means pretty much the same thing. Through a uPortal portal viewed from the perspective of collective intelligence and a learning organisation, the presenter and his computer will address the sometimes related topics and paradigms of: Digital work environment, Design with more or less zero constraints, Collective intelligence and learning organisations, Chat in a meadow, Accessibility (referenced under WCAG, RGAA, a11y), Trees and other branches, Internationalisation (referenced under i18n), Falbalas, Live streaming of video courses (also with the keyword: Opencast), other conceptual architectural approaches based on Vaults, Architraves and other Soffits, and bootleg alcohol.
Read more → by Christian CousquerIlargia Inc. is Member of
JEDI : Juvenile Entrepreneur Digging the Immersive
Two kittens dressed as Jedi knights stare at you with lightsabers in their hands.