Hello everyone, for my A3 assignment, I decided to explore a possible solution to the problem of career education that we have been struggling with for years. And mixed reality technology could be a good way to explore different options.
My website can be found here.
Hi Jane,
Great content here. Also, haven’t seen a Google site in a while — nice!
It was interesting to see your take on mixed reality as a way of promoting career education and combatting career uncertainty. It points to the increasingly prevalent theme of experimental learning in education today — why read about something when you can actually… do it?
I’m imagining the possibilities with your MR solution — real-life and applicable tasks during job interviews, shadowing someone for a work day, interactive job postings, tech support, and so much more. These would sure be nice with the current COVID situation…
Hi Jane, I really like your idea of using mixed reality for career education. It made me reflect on how students choose their majors and really how little they might know about different options available. When I was selecting an university major in high school, I definitely felt like I lacked life experience to know the career options available and I wished that I have explored more possible careers before making a decision. When I was in junior high/high school in Canada, we had “Take Your Kids to Work Day” where companies welcome employee’s children to learn about what work is like. However, these types of short pre-university job shadowing is heavily dependent on your family connections. With mixed reality, students can learn more about different careers and make a more informed decision. As someone with a Chinese background, I certainly resonate with some of the problems you described, but I wonder if the high pressure, highly competitive environment in China makes it difficult for students to have time to carefully consider and learn about different careers. Thank you again for a great idea and an awesome resource! Your site is easy to navigate and very informative.
Thank you Linda.
Yes, I understand your concern about when would the students have time to do this under this high-pressure curriculum. Actually, I have seen good signs that school are trying different things to show that they are working towards on building diverse and featured schools. Creating featured lessons have became one of the criteria when schools are competing for higher ranking. Many schools are setting aside time to do more activities. There’s definitely room for improvement and it’s getting better.
HI Jane, this is a great learning experience for me on how the education system works there. It is unfortunate that the divide between students and their educational career, are the institutional practices themselves that keep them out. The politics of it makes it less than ideal for students to really open their career choices and be successful in life.
Looking at your Mixed reality presentation, I do see some potential in using it but the adoption for universities to go that route might be limited at the start. The ideas you have, discussed their potential after they get into their degrees and how universities tackle learning experiences for distant learning perhaps using MR.
Going back to your case on students choosing majors, how would mix reality play a role in pre-enrolment in career education? The videos suggest that students need to explore their strengths and choices however, as we know today, what we register in our undergrad today doesn’t necessary be what we end up with as a career and this is similar globally. Perhaps mixed reality would be useful in training career educators to support relevant PD and technologies that help them foster students to a better-informed future.
Great in depth insight into this.
Hi Luke,
Thank you for your comment. I totally agree that educators should definitely practice PD with various technologies. Being update to date tonew techs seems more important in this era than ever before for educators, because everybody is connected all the time. My idea of MR for career education deprived from being job shadow when we tried to recruit new staff, through which they could have an idea of the content of the job. That’s something I want the students to have the opportunity to try before they choose a major for university. I think trying out work experience is something students of all age (educators should make sure the content is students/age appropriate) should do to help them find their passion.
Hi Jane,
I really enjoyed your topic for the A3. It comes to somewhat of a surprise that 60% of adults regret their career decision, that is extremely high. Imagine if mixed reality could be the answer to cut that in half! Careers are obviously an extremely important choice in life, yet one of the hardest choices. Often you hear first year students saying that they are just taking courses because they know they need to go to post-secondary school so might as well start somewhere, yet have no idea their end goal. Not only does this lead to another statistic on your site, but a waste of money and dissatisfaction. And of course, on the contrary, some students have known exactly what they want to do since they were a very young age. As you state on your site, career fairs clearly aren’t the answer, although they definitely spark interest. Career fairs could still be a beneficial opportunity if they were delivered in a more modern way. Imagine a career fair full of mixed reality opportunities where students explore the stations set up and choose three to interact with using VR. Or like you mentioned, doing it remotely and streaming them to their teacher. I think the reason people are dissatisfied with their job is because they don’t know of all the job opportunities out there or what they are exactly like! I am excited to see VR and AR be used this way in the future.
Hi Kylie,
Thank you for engaging. I really like your idea about the having a career fair to explore the opportunities with MR in different stations. The career fair we held wasn’t that successful because we picked the speakers (professional workers from their fields), and usually they don’t have time to rehearse their speech with the teachers. Some of them didn’t quite know how to attract students’ attention. Using technologies to ensure the authenticity of the experience would yield better result for the students.