Implementing Immersive Technology – From One College President to Another

By Dr. Mary Gallagher, Managing Director, Eduvators LLC

In the summer of 2018, I experienced virtual reality for the first time. Yes--the goggles--and it changed me forever. I could only imagine the possibilities of bringing educational content to life through augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (also known as XR) that fully engages students into an individual learning environment whereby the student can “replay” the content as often as is needed to learn subject matter that is either foundational or typically challenging to understand. Think about every student in every class improving their learning outcomes by using this new technology. To me, this is the most equitable approach to learning that you can undertake.  

I have never considered myself a “techie.” I was in college in the mid-70s when I punched cards to create a program and waited 24 hours for my “try” to come back only to find that I had minor errors and had to wait to reshuffle and/or re-punch to run it again. I knew technology was not “my thing.” But, if you have not already done so, I strongly encourage you to have a demonstration of XR. My experience with virtual reality set a new course for me. 

First, I assembled a small team of excited faculty innovators and an innovative administrator who could shepherd in this new effort. We developed a three-year plan of what we hoped to accomplish. We had to leverage and braid funding from several sources to support this project. As luck would have it, the federal funding to support education during the pandemic came through and that opened many more opportunities for us with this technology.  

I had a very aggressive approach to the planning of content creation at my institution. When we began, I wanted to have the first lessons available within a year. We learned quickly that there is very little content available for licensing. No peer-reviewed or “certified” lessons were available in the marketplace. So, our first step was to map out for ourselves what our expectations were for the content we would create ourselves and make available to our students. We determined the compensation for the faculty who would create content and we determined who the team would be to work with faculty to utilize the tools and develop XR experiences for students in classes with faculty creators.  

I had been talking with department chairs and faculty members about bringing XR to campus for several years and it was not received with much enthusiasm. Then the pandemic hit and, when we sent out the invitation for faculty to join our first cohort of content creators, we were astounded by the number of faculty across disciplines on the campus who were interested in joining this first cohort. We were hoping to have a cohort of 50 faculty members, and we had a waiting list. They are interested! I knew I had to step up my plan.   

There was no playbook for how to do this. There were a few institutions in the U.S and Canada working on this and some others around the world. We connected with other institutions and learned quickly how nascent the XR field was in education, and it remains the same today. My vice president who spearheaded this effort was able to develop plans, train faculty, coach and mentor faculty through the content develop process, and document what we were doing so that it could be scaled, replicated, and made available to others. The outcomes of the first two years were over 120 faculty trained, across over 65 disciplines, with over 1,000 lessons created, and a roadmap to licensing the content we created so that there would be a revenue stream to continue this work. The learning outcomes of this work over the two-year period was over 80 percent retention rate of information students experienced through XR; enthusiastic faculty feeling they were producing more creative and better lessons for students; and students having fun learning through this immersive technology experience. Our investment over this process of development, creation and delivery phases was approximately $2 million. Well worth the investment for these outcomes!  

Here were my three major takeaways: 

1. Be prepared to support your team and then let go. I know that can be difficult, but my faculty experienced learning something by managing through the frustrations of learning a new approach to helping students learn; they also experienced the joy of an average 80 percent retention rate in their classes using XR. The faculty who were fully engaged became excited about the opportunity to be creative again in their lesson planning. To really make the difference for students and their learning. And students expressed how great it was for them to fully engage with the content. They felt the college was now operating in the 21^st century. Students expressed that learning was fun. But also, be prepared to support the faculty who dare to be different as their peers can be quite negative about this new technology. Your faculty can feel very isolated so make sure to group your innovators together, regardless of their subject matter expertise, for support.  

2. Have members of your team available to review the faculty content to ensure it is of the quality expected. We developed milestones toward the completion of an experience (lesson) in order for faculty to be compensated. Training was online. We had coaches for our faculty if they got stuck trying to do something in a lesson. The coaches also helped the faculty think through how to create the content for the experience. Once the experience was created, we had faculty who peer-reviewed the lesson, based on a rubric we created, and “scored” the lesson on a scale of 1 to 3 (1 being highest).  

3. Accessibility is important, not only from a legal compliance standpoint, but also from an equity standpoint. We had faculty create an equally effective alternate access plan (EEAAP) for their experience to ensure that persons with disabilities had an alternate method of learning the lesson content. We found that often students were accessing both the XR content and the EEAAP. Faculty reported that students who accessed both methods performed better in the class.  

Finally, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the opportunity to license the lessons we were creating. Policies around intellectual property, ensuring that copyrights are not violated when faculty create content for licensing, and estimating the potential revenue stream are important considerations as you get started. We incorporated training for faculty around copyright violations and the importance of using original content, where possible, or content that is licensable or permissible to use.  

While integrating immersive technology into the classroom is not an easy undertaking, your students, your faculty, and your community will greatly appreciate your vision for their successful future.