Funds from Eon Reality to be used in  setup of interactive digital centre/lab

The University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus has received a US$25-million grant, the largest for the institution in decades, from Silicon Valley-based company, Eon Reality.

The grant will specifically go towards the development of an interactive digital centre/lab, primarily for the creation of content using augmented and virtual reality tools.

It comes directly from Eon Reality’s Educational Foundation, as part of its support towards educational institutions in the post-pandemic period.

The hub of the Eon XR Lab is earmarked to be located at The UWI Open Campus site in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, and will be the first institution in the English-speaking Caribbean to have an Eon XR Lab.

The project is slated to continue for over five years and the Open Campus will be able to offer training to UWI-wide faculty on the Eon XR Cloud Platform as well as student internships to those interested in learning how to develop content using this technology.

Immediate training for Open Campus staff

Training of staff is slated to begin in the next week.

In commenting on the grant, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of The UWI, congratulated the championing role that Dr Luz Longsworth has played in her capacity as principal of The UWI Open Campus.

Sir Hilary congratulated Longsworth, not just for securing the game-changing resources, but also the overall strategising of the UWI Global Online as a natural expansion development for the institution’s teaching and learning environment.

“This collaboration will provide the impetus for realising The UWI’s Global Campus initiative, our future without borders. The Open Campus is demonstrating, very practically, how it is driving our access revolution, with agility and alignment of our internal capacities across all our campuses,” Sir Hilary said.

“We celebrate the brilliance of our Open Campus leadership in pioneering this. Here is our frontline campus, evolving to keep apace of the changing times, while simultaneously changing the delivery of higher education in the region and at The UWI as a whole.”

Remarkable revenue generation opportunity for the Open Campus

Longsworth, who is also The UWI’s pro vice-chancellor for global affairs, pointed to the remarkable revenue generation opportunity for the Open Campus and The UWI.

“We see this as a way to open up even further collaboration with industry in developing new training tools for their staff,” she said.

In continuing, Longsworth said that, “furthermore Eon Reality’s global academic network educational institutions on several continents, allows us to leapfrog into the international access of the UWI’s courses and programmes within their network. This signals a new move forward for developing exciting content for our online and blended programmes”.