Reduce expenses with an innovative training solution

The essence

T2 Campus of VDAB is a tech talent hub for engineering and technology. They offer a range of training courses for employees, entrepreneurs and job seekers. As in-person training is expensive and not always possible, they were looking for a way to create a more efficient way of educating, and even a way to remotely educate their students. They contacted us to create a HoloLens solution that facilitates such an efficient training program.

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The challenge

An innovative way of teaching

As the T2 Campus is the only campus in Belgium that owns certain complex machinery, students from all over the country gather at the site in Genk for two education days. As VDAB covers their overnight stay, this brings a lot of expenses. On the other hand, because of COVID-19, in-person training wasn’t possible for a long time.

Therefore, they were looking for a way to not only train their students more efficiently on-site, but also to train them remotely. This would result in only one day of on-site training, and thus eliminating overnight stay expenses.

As a bonus, they reflected that an innovative way of teaching would also attract more students. It even allows for potential students to discover the T2 campus remotely.

The Solution

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist offer VDAB exactly what they need. Therefore, we decided that a tailor-made application wasn’t necessary. After all, it’s not our job to reinvent the wheel, is it.

With MS Guides, VDAB can easily create step-by-step holographic instructions that demonstrate how to operate specific machinery. It shows vital information about the machines, highlights important (safety) aspects, and guides students throughout the whole process.

The teachers of VDAB can use Remote Assist to share their real-time view (on the machines) to remote students. Students get a first-person view of what their teacher is doing and how the machines are controlled. Both students and the teacher can communicate and even make annotations to the livestream.

With our help, VDAB’s students can now be trained fully autonomously on site, and/or can follow along remotely.

Our approach

Leveraging existing solutions

We performed an analysis of the requirements and did market research to validate if and which tools meet the needs of VDAB. If we couldn’t find a suitable existing app, we would create a tailor-made solution. During our study, we found that both MS Guides and MS Remote Assist met all the requirements.

However, some customization was in order. We created a MS Guides training and mapped this to their machines. Next, during a training day for the instructors of VDAB, we demonstrated how MS Guides and MS Remote Assist work and taught them how they can create their own guides.

After the implementation phase, we used several methodologies to conduct a user experience survey. Both students and instructors were questioned, and the results were very positive. VDAB will now start to unroll the HoloLens throughout several of their educations.