shepherddMeyRAR

In today's rapidly evolving educational landscape, traditional teaching methods often struggle to engage and effectively educate students. This leads to suboptimal learning outcomes and fails to prepare students for the challenges of the modern world. Our solution aims to revolutionize education by leveraging experiential learning through augmented reality (AR), interactive quizzes, and microlearning modules. By integrating these innovative techniques into our Learning Management System, Shepherdd, we seek to enhance student engagement, foster deeper understanding, and ultimately improve learning outcomes across various educational settings.

The significance of the problem we're addressing lies in the growing need for a more dynamic and personalized approach to education. With the rise of technology and the digital age, students are accustomed to interactive and immersive experiences in their daily lives. However, traditional educational methods often fall short in providing such experiences, resulting in disengagement and a lack of motivation to learn. By harnessing the power of AR, interactive quizzes, and microlearning, we're not only meeting students where they are but also catering to their individual learning styles and preferences.

Moreover, our approach doesn't just benefit students; it also empowers educators to create more dynamic and effective teaching materials. Shepherdd provides educators with the tools they need to design engaging lessons, track student progress, and adapt their teaching methods in real-time. This not only improves the learning experience for students but also supports teachers in their professional development and effectiveness.

By tackling this fundamental issue, we're not just addressing a specific problem, but we're also paving the way for a more effective and engaging approach to education that empowers students to thrive in the 21st century. Ultimately, our goal is to bridge the gap between traditional teaching methods and the needs of today's learners, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to succeed in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced world

Our solution is the integration of Augmented reality into our Learning Management System to encourage experiential education coupled with microlearning and interactive quizzes.

Learners will engage with interactive 3D models to understand their parts. These parts if biological parts, will have annotations on the various parts.

Learning can toggle between 3D mode and AR modes to interact with the objects in their physical space.

One of our microlearning approaches is to get learners to learn in short bites using our developed program called, Burst. Though we have interactive quizzes on our platform, we are yet to integrate a couple of interactive quizzes into Burst as a means to help gamify and internalize the learning experience.

The Augmented reality aspect uses the Google Modelviewer API to seamlessly help people integrate AR and 3D objects in their projects and we will add our AR projects created in Adobe Aero to make it more immersive,

Below are some experiments in Ar

Video 1-  model viewer (Biology)

video 2- adobe Aero(Digestive system)

video 3-

Below are sample experiments with Burst without the interactive quizzes components.

mitochondrion,   human skin, inner ear, human brain, animal cell, heart, digestive system,  plant cell, renal system 

Our solution, Shepherdd, is designed to serve a global audience, including individuals and educational institutions around the world. While our headquarters are based in Ghana, our platform is accessible to users from diverse cultural, linguistic, and geographical backgrounds.

Shepherdd aims to impact the lives of both educators and students in several ways. For educators, our platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and resources to enhance their teaching practices, regardless of their location. They can create engaging and interactive learning materials tailored to the specific needs of their students, track progress, and collaborate with peers on a global scale. This empowers educators to deliver high-quality education and adapt to the ever-changing demands of the modern classroom.

For students, Shepherdd offers a transformative learning experience that goes beyond traditional textbooks and lectures. Through interactive modules, augmented reality simulations, and personalized quizzes, students can engage with course content in a dynamic and immersive manner. This not only improves their comprehension and retention but also fosters a deeper passion for learning.

Additionally, our platform promotes inclusivity by accommodating diverse learning styles and preferences, ensuring that every student, regardless of their background or location, has access to quality education. By bridging geographical barriers and providing equal opportunities for learning, Shepherdd has the potential to positively impact the lives of millions of individuals worldwide, helping them unlock their full potential and thrive in an increasingly interconnected world.

The team to handle this project has one having a computer vision background and the other having an Artificial intelligence and Machine learning background and are open to learning new technologies.

Aside from that, they would be paired with the other team members if need be, who are UIUX and full stack developers to develop the front end of the product and other technical assistance they might need outside Artificial intelligence.

To add to the above, our courses are influenced by a global demand by students as aggregated by Udemy using Udemy's market insights and what courses my learners are taking or interested in.

Also, we are informed by what people want by sending out a form for us to decide the kind of programs to run and the mode(physical or virtual).

These forms can be personal projects or partnerships with institutions who want to work with us.

Leveraging these insights helps us to know the courses to create.

Udemy's market insight:

Below are insights about students taking my course on udemy

Below is a form we wanted to organize with an institution The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE)-

Below is a form on a programming course we wanted to organize

Below is a post-evaluation form for a training we organized on mobile app development.

We've built and tested our Augmented reality project basically for experiential learning including interactive quizzes and microlearning. Currently, we've been able to augment(AR) some biological parts with interactive quizzes and microlearning using quiwzcards and shepherdd platforms respectively.

Here is a link to a prototype submitted to a recent hackathon.

The tool is called meyRAR and currently does not serve any customers. This tool would be integrated into our Learning Management System called shepherdd.

I would need assistance with research and technical support to help in making sure that the technologies work seamlessly across all devices and researchers help in curating and getting us reliable information on the kind of biological parts we augment.

Also, financial support would be helpful for us to purchase or hire 3D modelers to model parts( biological parts etc) so we can annotate them for our augmented reality experiences.

Moreover, we would want our tool (meyRAR) to meet global ethical internet standards just so we respect the privacy policies of every continent where our learners are.

Addressing the issue on how to ensure experiential learning especialy with science-related topics, our tool was created to help with this using augmented reality, microlearning and interactive quizzes.

The Augmented reality aspect uses Google's modelviewer API to help with the AR experience. This would be tied to microlearning slides to help with easy retention and interactive quizzes to test leaner's knowledge of a subject.

The above mentioned are inspired by the below quotes, 

''Augmented reality will truly change the way we view the world''.-Alhadef

-Leonardo da Vinci
“Learning never exhausts the mind,” is a reality when learning programs provide worthwhile and useful content to learners. 

“In a quiz competition, knowledge is your strongest ally.” – Unknown

“The real competition is not against other contestants; it is against yourself, to surpass your own limits.” – Unknown

Below are some screenshots of a survey i conducted earlier this year demonstrating the use of my tool.

 Leveraging on the power of Google's open source code (modelviewer) which allows developers to build Augmented Reality projects that runs on all platforms, we can seamlessly and have seamlessly built AR projects which works well. This coupled with our microlearning and interactive quizzing on shepherdd, will help make learning an experiential one hence, improve learning outcome.

Our impact goal is to see learners appreciate science, have a good understanding of science-related topics through experiential learning on our LMS platform,shepherdd.

To track this, infusing meyRAR into our LMS (shepherdd) to track learner's activities through their interactions with quizzes and microlearning slides tied to each model/ experience and the average time spent in the experience /subject.

The core technology powering our tool (meyRAR) is Google's modelviewer technology.

The technology makes building and infusing Augmented reality technology in a web service seamlessly easier and, it works on all platforms hence, democratizing the experience.

Also on the LMS aspect, shepherdd is powered by Wordpress, a React app, OpenAI(about 90% complete), Google meet API, Zoom API, Paystack, firebase and many other technologies to mention but a few.

Full-Time: 2

Part-time: 13

Contractors: 1, (We've reached out to an institution to help with the development of certain aspects of our project, especially the Augmented Reality aspects).

We have worked on this solution for less than a year; conceptualized it in the early months of 2023 and prototyped it in a global hackathon.

We gladly welcome individuals who are willing and constantly learning to improve education; whether you are a student(required working age) or researcher and of any gender.

We also cherish remote work hence, allowing persons with some form of disability to work from the comfort of their home and also opening us to working with diverse groups from across the globe.

We plan to offer discounted courses, free courses and the following:

1. Charge for premium access to richer content and quizzes
2. Offer a paid membership subscription plan.
3. Allow Free courses but comes with educational Ads at some point in time
4. Do paid virtual sessions with University students or High school students
5. Do paid physical sessions at Universities students or High school students
6. Work directly with software companies to create courses based on their platform

I am an instructor on Udemy and I plan to use Udemy's coupon practices and course giftings to help generate revenue as seen below from two of my separate Udemy accounts.

Also, any course I create will be made available on Udemy and any other online platform I instruct as a means to generate external revenue for my platform.

To add to the above, we can add a paid membership subscription plan to encourage payment commitments and consistent revenue stream on a lifetime payment plan(pay lump sum and have access to the course for life) and, silver membership plan( reduced amount) and a gold membership plan(pay a lump sum amount for an initial payment and have access to the courses for a year, then pay a reduced yearly amount).

Furthermore, reaching out to institutions and NGO's who would like to enroll a selected number of students to use our products would be a good option especially if we have them offering scholarships on a recurring basis for learners to use our services. 

Moreover, I plan to participate in hackathons and competitions with my solutions to raise funds for improvement in some functionalities that will help us scale.

Also, we can partner with software institutions to provide courses based on their platform so learners can have the courses at a discount hence improving revenue for both parties. This example was something I did in partnership with Uizard