Faculty Stories
This section of the IMEX Lab site aims to give our faculty clients from across the Commonwealth a space to share their stories: where their teaching activities came from, what goals they had for their students and how immersive technologies helped bring it all together.
To schedule a consultation, plan an assignment or a training session for your class please get in touch.
HORT 269 + 368 at University Park
Dr Margaret Crowley Hoffman was able to successfully integrate immersive content into her Landscape Contracting coursework as part of a two year-long Faculty Fellows project, offering a 360º tour viewing activity as well as two 360º tour creation activities across two Fall semester HORT 269 and two Spring HORT 368 classes. Dr Hoffman developed and revised the creation assignments and rubrics tailored to working first with Google Tours and then with Thinglink. Students in HORT 368 integrated the Thinglink tours into their final client design proposal presentations, merging on-site content capture with 3D rendering output and live demonstration.
Dr Hoffman continues her Faculty Fellows work with ongoing formal IRB approved research and classroom instruction around immersive content with support from IMEX Lab and Learning Design staff. Margaret is also actively pursuing future-facing technologies through exploration with the Interactive Experiences team that includes augmented and virtual reality tools with applications to Landscape Contracting.
Biology 220W at Beaver
Dr Cassandra Miller-Butterworth brings immersive experiences into her Biology 220W (Populations & Communities) for several reasons. Students traditionally found the multiple-weeks lectures on global biomes to be tedious and the visual aids to be less than memorable when it came time to test their knowledge. By leveraging 360º videos of terrestrial and aquatic environments, Dr Miller-Butterworth is able to not only increase engagement with the course content, but also retention of facts about each or the biomes presented.
The immersive content is packaged together by IMEX Lab with an online resource, the HHMI BiomeViewer, that allows students to put video content in context on a globe. Cassandra also provides a “field notebook” activity encouraging students to reflect on their experiences and make observations about the places they visit through headsets in and out of class. In so doing, she is able to reduce the number of formal lectures on the topic of biomes to one as well.
Let’s Hear Your Story…
If you’ve been using immersive activities to help your students engage with the topics of the course you teach, why not share your experiences with your colleagues across the Commonwealth? Whether you’ve been working with IMEX Lab to start this endeavor or you’ve just recently partnered up with us, we’d be happy to get your story online.
There are a few easy ways to get started: You can either run off the four quick questions, find someone to ask them and stop by a One Button Studio on campus, set up in your home office with our One Button Studio at Home guidance – or contact your location’s consultant to film your responses as a recorded Zoom meeting. Our team will handle the editing and uploading.