Virtual Reality in Library Digital Sandbox Powers HLSS Anatomy & Physiology Learning

Move over Scantrons and pages of multiple-choice and true-false questions. Head-mounted HTC Vive viewers, handheld controllers, student teams, and color monitors delivered the successful Virtual Reality (VR) final exam for Prof. Scarlet Jost’s Anatomy and Physiology class this fall in the Library Digital Sandbox. Students used VR devices in the Digital Sandbox and in other library VR locations to find more than 90 muscles and joints. They then identified the start and end of each, along with their actions.

Both Prof. Jost and her Health, Leisure, and Sport Science (HLSS) students expressed enthusiasm for VR as a mode of learning. One student said VR made it “extremely helpful to . . . see the shape of each muscle in all dimensions, as well as where it attaches on the skeleton. It’s like the little puzzle boards we give to preschoolers; you have to find where it fits, and so you learn the shape of it” with 3D VR.

This successful use of VR to meet course objectives goes back to the vision of Mike Mathews, VP of Innovation and Technology. In late 2018 he asked library dean Dr. Mark E. Roberts if the library could help spread the immersive learning technologies in the Global Learning Center across the campus. Roberts grasped the opportunity and asked already-busy Instruction & Reference Librarian Prof. Myra Bloom to oversee adopting Library Learning Technologies (all things Augmented and Virtual Reality). Mathews suggested creating a Library Digital Sandbox, a place for serious play using digital technologies. The library, assisted by ORU IT, began buying and borrowing devices for the Sandbox and the AVR Faculty Room.

As library liaison to HLSS, Prof. Bloom evangelized her friend Prof. Jost with the benefits of these immersive technologies. At first, Bloom recalls, Jost did not even want to put an Oculus or VIVE headset on. But when she finally did, a new world of VR blossomed for her, and the two began a three-year collaboration on matching learning software with VR devices. Finally, this fall, after delays from Covid-19 and with ongoing support from ORU IT, the Library Digital Sandbox opened fully. Prof. Jost had the entire HLSS Anatomy and Physiology class use the software Organon 3D with VR devices and sent students to the library to take the VR final exam.

Jost expects to use VR more often and more fully with her next class of some 80 Anatomy and Physiology students. They will need all the library VR user stations, along with those available in the Global Learning Center. And Prof. Bloom continues to help faculty discover how VR and AR (and other new learning technologies) can integrate with their courses. Prof. Bloom welcomes faculty interested in exploring new learning technologies to reach her at x7174 and mbloom@oru.edu.