How are we providing quality education?
The United Nations established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, as part of the 2030 Agenda, which serve as an urgent call to action for the global community. This is the second in a series of articles on how our goals are aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This blog will discuss SDG 4 – ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning.
Education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is key to escaping poverty. Over the past decade, major progress was made towards increasing access to education and school enrollment rates at all levels, particularly for girls. Nevertheless, about 260 million children were still out of school in 2018 — nearly one fifth of the global population in that age group. Additionally, more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide are not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics.
At VR City, we see these problems, and we work every day to find solutions. We not only value the availability of quality education, but we also greatly value the accessibility of education. Through our virtual community for aviation students, we’ve found a way to make learning effective and accessible to students who may have little to no access to traditional learning resources. Listed below are the tools and strategies we use to provide a strong, reliable, and widespread academic reach to students of any background or location.
A Training Environment for All
To ensure inclusive and quality education for all, Delphi Technology Corp. provides a child-, disability-, and gender-sensitive virtual learning environment. Due to the adaptive nature of the virtual platform, the VR City training experience is made easy and equitable for students of all backgrounds. Regardless of gender, age, learning style or skill, VR City’s well-structured programs equip each individual learner with the tools they need to have an equal learning experience to all of our other users. Additionally, we provide all students with a safe, non-violent, and productive learning environment by offering personalized learning to meet their needs and allowing them to learn at their own pace. Furthermore, we aim to eliminate educational disparities between genders through our partnership with Elevate Aviation. We collaborate with them to empower young girls who would like to be aviators in the future. Similar to this, we’ve also partnered with the Canadian sisterhood of female pilots The Ninety-Nines for the same cause of encouraging girls in aviation. We ensure that all other groups, such as persons with disabilities, visible minorities, indigenous peoples and many more, have equitable access to all levels of education.
Online Practices
As per United Nations’ research, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the progress the UN’s Quality Education goal significantly. According to the UN SDG website, the pandemic-related school closures kept 90% of all students out of school, reversing years of educational progress. As VR City is a virtual platform, the educational materials in VR City have the power to avoid this regression. The online aspect of VR City makes it flexible and reliable in a time of crisis, such as COVID-19. Using online learning modules and live online webinars with professional instructors, we ensure that our high-quality educational resources are always accessible, at any time and in any location, regardless of the circumstance.
Interactive STEM Modules
You might be thinking that virtual learning on your computer is arduous, but that’s not the case with VR City! Our team works relentlessly to develop dynamic and engaging STEM modules that make learning both practical and enjoyable. We use simple, visually stimulating animations in our courses that break down the more difficult concepts. We also allow for customization in learning plans to accommodate different learning styles. Students are also given knowledge tests at various points during the module to reinforce the lessons as well as provide a means to gauge their progress. Furthermore, our testing strategies are also more flexible than most. We give students the opportunity to see and learn from their mistakes. Additionally, they are given as many chances as they need to complete the questions and fully grasp the concept. Whether you are learning about navigation, aircraft design, or air law, our modules ensure that the information is delivered accurately while providing the student an engaging, flexible, and involved learning experience.
Virtual Chatbots
Interactive chatbots deliver information and provide help almost instantly. When knowledge is easily accessible and readily available when needed, a student’s learning process becomes quicker and more efficient. In VR City, we have an interactive chatbot called Skyleus, which acts as a virtual tutor for all our students. The chatbot can be used for a variety of purposes, including helping users navigate easily through their courses and acting as a Pilot’s dictionary by defining aviation terms. Our interactive chatbot also has the ability of performing what we call Skyleus Stories. These storiesare interactive, choice-based stories delivered via text and audio by Skyleus. Whenever the story runs into a problem, the student is presented with possible action choices. This activity promotes critical thinking in high-stakes emergency scenarios and enables students to immediately see the repercussions of their choices, whether correct or incorrect. In developing a student’s quick-thinking skills, the activity can prepare them for high-pressure situations inside and outside the cockpit. The results of this tool align with the SDG as they both target teaching technical skills that will help them in the workforce. The chatbots do this through instantaneous feedback and readily available tools and information.
Real-Time Feedback in ManeuvAIR
Our ManuevAIR flight simulator provides real-time feedback to users as they learn and practice new flight skills. Providing feedback to students during their lessons help provide an additional buffer to ensure the student understands the instructions correctly. We use artificial intelligence systems to pick up on the nuances in a student’s flight performance, assisting us in determining the underlying cause of their mistakes before they turn into habits. Using AI, ManeuvAIR provides instruction and feedback equivalent to having the full attention of a flight instructor whenever you fly. A potential disadvantage that we needed to watch out for is the possibility that corrective action is being given too early on, preventing students from making mistakes that they need to make and learn from. This is why we take a holistic approach to teaching, where we analyse performance across multiple attempts to distinguish between a one-off mistake and a developing habit. Because of the programming our team puts into ManeuvAIR, the feedback provided to students is equally as advanced and sophisticated as in-person training. ManeuvAIR makes virtual flight instructors available to students at any time, especially when human teachers are unavailable. The flexible accessibility of this real-time feedback contributes to the quality education that VR City programs provide.
The Future
As we continue to grow our business, we are also working to expand the opportunities available to our students. We are always seeking to invite esteemed and experienced instructors in the aviation industry to speak with our students, impart lessons and advice, and we are working to have more scholarships available to our students worldwide. VR City’s goal is to improve aviation training by providing an adaptable and interactive training experience via the use of contemporary technology. In this manner, our corporate mission aligns perfectly with SDG 4. Our practices as described above push us further towards our shared goal with the United Nations of providing quality education to a worldwide student body.