Imagine you want to be a writer, and being able to interview John Steinbeck for pointers. Or maybe you have mobility issues, but yearn to hike the Continental Divide. Or even that you want to be a scientist, and you could actually walk around inside a stem cell.
Just about anything educators and students want to teach or learn soon will be reality — virtual reality, that is — as St. Charles Community College (SCC) becomes the first community college in the Midwest, and one of the first in the nation, to introduce Dreamscape Learn in its Center for Immersive Learning this month. The virtual reality (VR) learning experiences of Dreamscape Learn are revolutionizing how students engage with complex subjects through augmented, virtual reality and immersive, cinematic storytelling. And they’re allowing area students to excel in an increasingly complex and competitive workforce.
“Biology in the Alien Zoo” will be the first of these experiential immersive learning experiences offered at SCC. Dreamscape's original virtual reality adventure transports users to an orbiting wildlife sanctuary for endangered life-forms from the far corners of the universe, wherein students become actual field biologists who discover, analyze and solve novel multifaceted, real life science problems.
Dreamscape Learn team members, which develop and provide the VR technology and experiences like Alien Zoo and others, have developed courseware for introductory STEM courses that enable faculty to send students on virtual scientific “missions,” where they collaborate with peers to develop the analytical and quantitative skills necessary to solve complex problems while mastering core facts and knowledge.
Dr. Amy Koehler, provost and chief academic officer at SCC, says these are modern-day internship-like experiences, the latest and best in hands-on, application-based learning. “I'm a cardiothoracic nurse by trade. When I finished my master’s education, they couldn’t guarantee I experienced all of the situations a real nurse experiences. At that time, students could spend hundreds of hours in a hospital setting and never experience critical scenarios that nurses training now can experience in a virtual reality setting.”
The concept was developed by Dreamscape Immersive co-founder and acclaimed Hollywood executive Walter Parkes, along with Academy Award-winning director and producer Steven Spielberg. Dreamscape Learn is a collaborative venture between Dreamscape Immersive and Arizona State University (ASU), merging the most advanced learning concepts with the entertainment industry's best storytelling.
Since its launch in 2022, the Alien Zoo course has been used in introductory biology classes and has reached more than 25,000 ASU students. Their research found that students performed better in courses that integrated the new approach to teaching and learning, with participants being nearly two times more likely to achieve an A grade. Today, ASU has fully transitioned its introductory biology labs to the Dreamscape Learn platform.
Some 500 students are expected to participate in courses that integrate Dreamscape Learn in its first year at SCC. And Amy says the possibilities for the future are only as limited as the dreams of faculty, staff and students. Using the Dreamscape Software Development Kit, student developers will be able to build their own experiences. And faculty can take their students anywhere in the universe at any date in all of history.
“As new content is developed, additional students will be impacted across academic disciplines, allowing every St. Charles student to engage in virtual learning in the Dreamscape environment,” Amy says. “History students could experience downtown St. Louis in the 19th century, interview Abraham Lincoln or even stand on a Civil War battlefield. Art students could climb up to see Michelangelo's Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Students who are interested in genetics and chemistry could be standing surrounded by molecules. Living those experiences is powerful in terms of the amount of information we can present, and students can retain.”
Participants can choose to be seated with joy sticks or take part in “free roam pod experiences,” where they move around interactively. They'll be able to touch and feel things with sensor gloves. Industrial trade experiences will allow future plumbers or welders to practice their craft over and over before they ever enter the workforce.
Dreamscape will be offered in the college’s Center for Immersive Learning, a 3,500-square-foot space in SCC’s Conoyer Hall on its main campus in Cottleville.
“In the short time since our first student stepped into our interactive worlds, we’ve seen that utilizing VR-enabled experiences in the classroom can reliably and effectively engage students, driving marked success in both achievement and retention,” says Josh Reibel, CEO of Dreamscape Learn. “Students at St. Charles Community College will have the ability to immerse themselves fully into the source material, and do so along with their peers and instructors, building collaboration at each step of the way.”