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Description
The innovative project in education and tourism will enable students and the public to provide effective and interactive education in a sustainable and accessible way, motivate and activate them by combining the principles of gamification, augmented reality and geosocial networks as a modern open electronic source of local geodata. Furthermore, the project seeks to change and modernise the current state of education and inform students and the public about the available public points of interest concerning cultural monuments and their history in tourism.
Another project aim is to share experiences and outputs between partner universities and experts in tourism. Researchers from the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences specialise in geosocial networks, data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Experts from the Czech University of Pardubice focus on geosocial networks, augmented reality, gamification, e-tourism and cultural monuments. Representatives of the Czech partner organisations will contribute to the discussion with their practical experience and help prepare the application.
The project will bring a disruptive change in education and increase awareness of cultural heritage importance among students and the public.
Summary of project results
The tourism sector, as well as education in traditional institutions, is facing a number of challenges these days, especially with the recent mass Covid infection. This pandemic makes it impossible for people to gather in traditional forms of tourism. Teaching in traditional ways has also needed to change. The problem is causing significant restrictions in the tourism segment and the nonfunctioning of many services (urban tourism in particular is seeing a drastic decline) of tourism in tourist destinations. The problem also limits education in traditional institutions to the online form, which may not always be able to sufficiently activate students. This is often due to the use of current online teaching applications and their poor user experience. Education and tourism have experienced convergence, even defining a new trend in so-called educational tourism, which seeks to educate and teach knowledge of the historical, cultural and social topics. The project was needed to be able to educate students and the public in our region across the educational areas of information technology and new media, history and tourism. This interdisciplinary connection allowed us to take the interesting intersectional themes of these areas and combine them into a fun and interactive widely accessible platform in the form of a mobile web application, as well as to expand on the themes in a detailed professional manner with a book and study and learning materials. The project aims to break down the barriers between seemingly different educational areas and to connect and interlink these into meaningful and engaging content that will be for free and freely accessible to students and the public.
In the project, we implemented two peer-learning activities with the aim of sharing knowledge in the areas of augmented reality, geosocial networks, data mining, 3D model building and mobile web applications. This knowledge sharing allowed us to complement each other''s knowledge among the project researchers and then, thanks to this, to shape the project outputs, which were a mobile web application, a professional book with ISBN and learning and teaching materials. To these outputs, 4 multiplication events were carried out to make students and teachers aware of the benefits and outputs of our project, which they can also use in their own institutions (two high schools, two universities). A mobile web application with information about local historical monuments in the cities of Pardubice and Litomyšl was introduced as a publicly available free service with sustainability for at least 2 years after the end of the project. The app offers texts, graphics with historical images, 3D graphic models and augmented reality in multimedia form for cultural monuments, in addition to a gamification system and free rewards for app users with regional products. Thanks to the project, the situation has improved to the point that the topic of education in the cultural heritage of Pardubice and Litomyšl has started to be discussed in the media
The results of the project are activating and educating students and tourism participants. That was realized thanks to the combination of modern mobile technologies and knowledge in the local history and tourism. These formed a freely accessible and barrier-free application for educating students and participants in the tourism industry, and a professional book (freely accessible) which brought expert insight into this issue. Gamification was supported by a modern form of augmented reality that allowed users to present information about selected cultural monuments in an engaging and interactive form, using the principles of gamification to better participation and motivation. The aim was to develop a methodology (described in a book with ISBN) for how a geolocation application with gamification principles can be used for activating and effectively educating the participant, using big data from Points of Interest of geosocial networks.
Summary of bilateral results
The partner from the University of Norway (HVL) is a significant authority in the field of working with data who has significant publishing experience and during the meeting he shared know-how on how to publish in prestigious high-impact journals. The partner HVL also gave valuable advice and feedback during the development of the application, especially what personal data to obtain from the application users within the application created by us, which was the output of the project. The partner from HVL significantly participated in the creation of chapters in the book and study materials in his area of work with data or artificial intelligence. The bilateral level results are planned publications of the researchers from the University of Pardubice in impacted scientific journals resulting from the acquired shared knowledge and created outputs.