4 Must Asks from your Augmented Reality provider

Before deciding on Augmented Reality tools for your classroom

Augmented Reality has ushered in a new wave in education. Though the jury is still out on the promised effectiveness of learning through Augmented Reality, significant strides towards student engagement drives home the point that AR is going to be in for the long haul.

But, before deciding to adopt some of these Augmented Reality solutions for your Classroom Setting, and absolutely before using it with students, if you are a District Administrator, Technology Director or an Educator, here are the 4 questions you need to ask your Augmented Reality provider.

Software used in your schools usually collect a lot of highly sensitive information including biometric data, academic progress, behavioural, disciplinary and medical information, web browsing history, students’ geolocation, IP addresses, and classroom activities. Such data poses a treasure trove for malicious agents.

Dec ’18: A phishing attack against California’s San Diego Unified School District has led to hackers scooping up Social Security numbers and addresses of more than 500,000 students and staff…50 district employees had their log-in credentials compromised (Link)

Some of the important questions around Security to ask your Augmented Reality providers are:

• What data do you collect from Students?
• Which database provider do you use for your application?
• What Action Plan do you have in case of a Data Breach of any nature?
• What mechanism do you have to detect if there has been a Data Breach in your Database?

Privacy is one of the most important concerns of the digital age. Hence, knowing the governing regulations surrounding Privacy issues, at least broadly will help you choose a secure Augmented Reality solutions over others.

Sep ’18: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a Public Service Announcement (PSA) that encourages public awareness of cyber threat concerns related to K-12 students (Link)

Some of such existing regulations are FERPA, PPRA, and COPPA. Another one of such groundbreaking regulations which delineates guidelines in detail is GDPR.

Some of the important questions around Privacy to ask your Augmented Reality providers are (Use the AR Provider Toolkit for detailed questionnaire):

• How closely aligned is your firm and its product(s) are with GDPR and COPPA?
• Where is your privacy policy listed?
• If I ask you right now to delete my data from your database, how many days would it take you to comply?

We have had conversations with 137 educators till now during the process of building eureca and eurecaStudio. Though the awareness of GDPR and its impact on how ed-tech products must protect students’ privacy is on the rise, it absolutely behooves us as education professionals, to spend more and more time on asking the right questions about privacy.

Availability of adequate training programs in the form of webinar, YouTube videos, documentations, etc. shows the care and preparedness displayed by the providers towards who they are catering to with their product. Educators increasingly are pressed for time to spend experimenting with products and learn their capabilities.

All tech products must warrant User Experience to be as intuitive as possible so as to obviate training programs. But the need for a structured training program along with support will always remain imperative.

Alignment of Augmented Reality solutions with #makerspace, #blendedlearning and more, will make the need of such training programs apparent. It is lamentable with most of the solutions we researched about seem to consider Training & Support programs as peripheral.

Some of the important questions around Training & Support to ask your Augmented Reality providers are (Use the AR Provider Toolkit for detailed questionnaire):

• Who are a part of your Support Team? Do they know the product well enough themselves?
• How easily accessible the Support Team is in case of a Support Request? Raise a support request and check it yourself.
• How many Point of Accesses (PoA) are your Support Team available at? Twitter? Facebook? Email? Chat?
• Where are your training videos listed?

School Finance is a zero-sum game. You have a finite amount of money, so any funds expended on technology are funds not spent to buy science lab equipments, or train teachers. As District Budgets shrink across most of United States Public Schools (+ Canada and Europe), technology departments most certainly are affected. In the US, out of a total spend of $ 12,200 (y. 2016) per student per year, technology spend comes to around $ 400 — $ 450 per student per year. It doesn’t make monetary sense to adopt a solution which doesn’t get you a “bang for your bucks”.

Hence, always look for solutions which address at least 70% of your overall curriculum needs. Collaborate with educators from other subjects before the evaluating the choice of your Augmented Reality provider, and even in such conversations.

Some of the important questions around Cross Curriculum offerings to ask your Augmented Reality providers are (Use the AR Provider Toolkit for detailed questionnaire):

• What are the subjects I can use your product(s) for?
• (If not) What are the future plan for extending it to <subject name>?
• How can I use the product(s) for <subject name> ?
• How much of the Common Core curriculum is the solution capable of covering?

The pro-active approach to lead your conversations with your Augmented Reality providers, in the form of these questions will pave way for you not only to make sure the product fits your curriculum needs securely, but also saves you and your school time and cost in reactive evaluations of such products.

Our Augmented Reality Provider Toolkit, to be published Jul 30th, helps you ask targeted and relevant questions and score multiple dimensions, including others apart from listed above to create an overall score for your Augmented Reality Solutions provider.

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