Why use Virtual Tours for Education?

Some benefits of using virtual tours include:

  • They display instantly what’s difficult to describe without physically being at a location. Virtual tours provides a way to immersively show, rather than just tell.
  • They provide a novel way to connect with and engage your audience of learners.
  • They give a feeling of exploring and learning within a realistic environment. This is especially suited for educating about subjects that have a three-dimensional aspect, like interior design, architecture, or universal design for the home.
  • Virtual environments and experiences are game-like, popular with youth audiences.  Gamification is a trend in education to make experiences more engaging and impactful.
  • VR technology, like virtual tours, helps overcome barriers of: distance, access hours, and pandemic concerns bringing remote educational locations to the viewer’s home.
  • Virtual tours can be used to remotely share what classroom and in-person teaching facilities are like to instructors.

Classroom 360 Virtual Tour examples at Ohio State University:

Naming files for the web

Here’s an interesting article about naming files for the web: http://www.ragepank.com/articles/50/spaces-underscores-and-dashes-how-to-name-files/

It seems that dashes may be the best way to separate words in a URL. A dash provides better readability than an underscore. Spaces are a bad idea to use because they turn into %20 in a URL and can be misinterpreted by some browsers.

Here’s another article about spaces in filenames and why they should be avoided in web content: http://www.blackbaudknowhow.com/blackbaud-sphere/spaces-in-filenames-and-why-you-should-avoid-them-on-the-web.htm