ABSTRACT
The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) and growing participation of students in work life has already in several decades moved ICT education into 'clouds', using sources of knowledge on Internet from all around the world. The COVID pandemic has increased this process, forcing universities to restrict classroom teaching and rapidly increased student's self-study.At the same time, increase of amounts of data to be processed is constantly introducing new high-level software technologies, layers and layers of packages and libraries, deeper and more complex. This has created a new 'top-down' programming style: a new project is started with importing mass of libraries which have been used in earlier projects and only then is considered how to use them in order to solve the programming task. The self-studying ICT students see only tips of modern software icebergs and it is difficult for them to understand their working without face-to-face classroom communication where details of the 'depths' are explained. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.
ABSTRACT
Collaborative academia-industry development and evaluation of virtual reality (VR) systems is a mutually beneficial opportunity to investigate VR technology in a real context and conduct user studies with target users. However, such collaboration is rarely performed due to variations in project pace and work methods. In this article, we introduce the process of action research on joint design, development, and evaluation of a collaborative VR system to address industrial needs. The paper further presents employees' subjective opinions and perceived value of industrial VR applications and reflects on their involvement throughout the process. The article concludes with a process-oriented framework for remote academia-industry collaboration, supported with practical suggestions on how to support this collaboration. Our experiences reveal the methods and advantages of remote collaboration in all phases of the process and signify the efficiency of the remote framework for academia-industry collaboration, especially relevant in the light of the COVID-19 pandemia. © 2021 ACM.