San Francisco, CA, May 04, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mursion, the industry leader in immersive VR training for social instinct practice, is pleased to announce its inclusion in the 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards by Fast Company. The prestigious recognition program honors the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving critical issues, such as essential workplace leadership, health and climate crises, social injustice, and economic inequality. The winners were announced this morning and will be featured in Fast Company’s Summer 2021 issue (on newsstands May 10).
Mursion partnered with the University of Wyoming (UW) College of Education and the UW Trustees Education Initiative (TEI) to develop avatar-led classroom simulations in a statewide teaching competition designed to inspire high school students to become teachers to help combat a growing shortage of educators in the state. The project served as a dynamic way to engage high school students in pursuing their agricultural teaching degrees. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the competition needed to be 100 percent virtual, which is where Mursion’s online capabilities proved beneficial.
“Mursion made it a more authentic experience for the students and ensured it was a teaching competition instead of just a teaching presentation,” said Lindsey Freeman, University of Wyoming Assistant Professional Lecturer and project lead. “These candidates got to experience real exposure to the actual work of teaching animal and plants sciences to students, and they also got to experience the rewarding nature of the job first-hand.”
Now in its fifth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 34 winners, more than 400 finalists, and more than 800 honorable mentions. A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 4,000 entries spanning education, food, politics, technology, transportation, and more. The 2021 awards feature entries from across the globe, from the U.S. to Brazil to Denmark and Vietnam.
“Learning is at the heart of all that Mursion does as a company,” said Mursion Co-Founder and CEO Mark Atkinson. “In formal educational settings, that equates to offering instructors powerful tools and resources to further advance their personal development and student achievement outcomes. The new paradigm for learning at every level must include social emotional learning. Educators and education leaders must not only develop a strong set of SEL instincts themselves; but they must also impart those instincts to their students. This requires a lot of practice. It is our high privilege to provide current and aspiring teachers a safe and effective environment to practice these and other urgent pedagogical skills.”
“There is no question our society and planet are facing deeply troubling times. So, it’s important to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, impact, design, scalability, and passion to solve these problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of Senior Editor Morgan Clendaniel, have discovered some of the most groundbreaking projects that have launched since the start of 2020.”
About the World Changing Ideas Awards
World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With the goals of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.
About Mursion
Powered by a blend of artificial intelligence and live human interaction, Mursion provides immersive VR training for essential skills in the workplace. Mursion simulations are designed for the modern workforce, staging interactions between learners and avatars to achieve the realism needed for measurable, high-impact results. Drawing upon research in learning science and psychology, Mursion harnesses the best in technology and human interaction to deliver outcomes for both learners and organizations. Mursion has been named as one of The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2021 by the Financial Times.
