Author: Francesca Albrezzi

As part two of four in UCLA’s HumTech XR series, HumTech’s  Megan Reusche‘s article focuses on the use of virtual reality (VR) in higher education. Insights and commentary regarding VR  implementation in higher education and at UCLA were provided by Francesca Albrezzi, Digital Research Consultant in the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education, and Lecturer in Digital Humanities at UCLA.

For Francesca, immersive technology like VR is important because it provides an opportunity to be transformative on a multisensory level. The more that we engage in the senses, the more we can impact a greater number of people. Learning through experience also engages all of our senses at once and helps with the formation of memory and, in turn, learning.

Read the article now on HumTech’s blog to learn more about the successes and limitations of this technology and how you can incorporate VR into your research projects and lesson plans.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

In the first article of this four-part series, HumTech’s  Megan Reusche sat down in spring 2019 to talk to Dr. Maja Manojlovic, a UCLA lecturer and Faculty Advisor for Writing II Pedagogy. Her current research examines the effects that VR technologies and cinematic 3D aesthetics have on our embodied experience of temporality and spatiality. She is also working on a few projects that study how VR shapes our identities, empathy, and relationships with others.

The goal of this first article is to provide readers with an all-encompassing introduction to these technologies, particularly to VR, that will prepare them for the upcoming installments.

Read the interview on HumTech’s Blog.

 

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

The HP/EDUCAUSE Campus of the Future project is now in its second year of investigation into the benefits of XR for teaching, learning, and research at the institution. Their most recent report focuses on the types of learning goals that are effectively supported by XR technology.

See what institutions participating in the XR project discovered about achieving learning goals, effective pedagogical uses, curricula integration challenges, XR adoption requirements, and factors influencing effectiveness by reading the report.

Reference

Pomerantz, Jeffrey. XR for Teaching and Learning: Year 2 of the EDUCAUSE/HP Campus of the Future Project. ECAR research report. Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, October 2019.