Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the educational field for years, but now some of Ohio Northern University’s (ONU) classes and services are beginning to take advantage of its applications.
After attending a conference put on by EDUCAUSE, Chief Information Officer Jeff Rieman began promoting a program called Ovation across campus.
OvationVR is a program that can run through virtual reality (VR) or computers to give students, student employees, or faculty immersive training in various scenarios through the use of AI. Users can interact with avatars using AI in order to respond, ask questions, or listen and interpret presentations.
According to Rieman, various programs are looking into using OvationVR, including the communications program for presentational purposes, nursing for virtual patient interactions, and Polar Careers for mock job interviews.
“I see the soft skills practice as being a huge benefit for students… that’s what really excited me about the product,” says Rieman. “I don’t think you should ever really totally replace practicing with another person because you do lose that a little bit, but practice, repetitive practice, and scaling up to large populations of practices is really beneficial, I think.”
The ONU Writing Center has also begun testing OvationVR for tutor training purposes.
“I immediately thought this would be a great supplement for tutor training,” says Director of the Writing Center Olivia Zolciak. “We had a tutor meeting, a few weeks ago now, to test it out… I thought it went really well.”
According to Rieman, ONU’s Office of Information Technology currently has five headsets, all equipped with OvationAI.
“You don’t have to be in a specific class here to use it,” according to Rieman. “[Students] can email me directly and get an account. I’d be more than happy to set one up for them, and they can schedule using the headsets with the help desk.”