Upskilling and reskilling employees are important for organizations as part of dealing with and emerging from shut-downs this year and next. It is also important to pay attention to and enhance your critical skills and for the entire instructional design and development team in L&D, and for other practitioners as well.
Among the most critical skill sets are coding and AR/VR development. Coding, specifically various "dialects" of JavaScript and C, expands your ability to enhance the products of authoring tools and game engines for instructional purposes. Augmented reality and virtual reality, the principal elements of extended reality (XR), are increasingly important technologies for our field.
This summer (beginning this week, in fact) there are two "limited time" opportunities that you may wish to take advantage of, or to encourage your team members to use.
Free foundational coding course for interactive games and experiences
Unity Technologies began offering one of these opportunities July 13th. Create with Code Live is back for a summer session, for anyone who wants to learn to code the fun way—by making games. It is not too late to begin the course.
Create with Code is a free, four-week program where you’ll gain foundational skills in Unity and C# programming to be able to create real-time, 3-D interactive games and experiences. The course will also teach the skills required to take the Unity Certified User exam.
The program is a combination of live, hour-long classes with Unity experts three times a week, and self-paced learning.
Register now (register one time to be enrolled in the entire course). Course started July 13 and runs through August 7.
- Each week, spend up to five hours working through the Create with Code course independently.
- Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, join in for the live portion of the course starting at 9 am PT. These hour-long virtual sessions are an opportunity for you to ask questions, get feedback, and work through any roadblocks you’ll have encountered while working independently. Session recordings will be posted for those unable to attend live.
- Optionally, after the course concludes on August 7, you’re invited to continue joining on Wednesdays for live sessions through September 9.
Succeed at AR/VR design
Software engineers and multimedia developers are experimenting with and creating augmented and virtual reality experiences. Users are wowed by their experience and we know it's going to be the next big thing in training. So how do instructional designers keep up? How do we make sure our AR or VR projects are more than just a cool experience? What do we need to do to create instructionally sound experiences that still wow our learners? There's a need to translate standard instructional design principles into experience design projects, and we'll walk you through the process.
Next week, Kristina Wilson will present her session "The Accidental AR/VR Instructional Designer: How to Adapt and Succeed" at the Realities360 Online Conference, July 23-24, 2020. You'll learn how to build on instructional design theory to create AR and VR experiences that resonate with learners. You'll explore how Kristina modified the ID process for two projects—the HoloDiesel (AR) and the Virtual Data Center (VR.) She'll walk you through what she learned in each of these projects—one AR and one VR—what she'd do differently, and how she's applying what she's learned to new projects. You'll also see real-world examples of experience design that you can use as you develop your own projects.
You can register for the Realities360 Online Conference or get a Learning Guild Online Conference Subscription to access this and all online conferences for the next year, plus much more. If you registered for Learning Solutions 2020 or Realities360 Conference & Expo, you will be granted free access when registering for this online conference.