by Robert Stephan, Caleb Simmons, Aviva Doery
Rob Stephan is an archaeologist by training and has taught in the University of Arizona’s Department of Religious Studies and Classics since 2016. Rob’s research interests focus on digital pedagogy, video games and the ancient world, and the use of innovative technologies in the online classroom. Over the past few years, Rob has won the College of Humanities Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s Gerald J. Swanson Prize for Teaching Excellence, and the Honors College’s Five Star Faculty Award.
Dr. Caleb Simmons (Ph.D., University of Florida) is the Executive Director of Online Education overseeing Arizona Online, UArizona’s online campus with over 9,500 students. He is also Professor of Religious Studies, and Faculty Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. He specializes in digital and online learning and religion in South Asia, especially Hinduism. He has recently been named a Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES) Distinguished Fellow for his research on online pedagogy.
Aviva is pursuing her PhD in Higher Education at the University of Arizona Center for the Study of Higher Education. Her research focuses on virtual reality pedagogy, asking questions about ethics and human rights in innovative digital spaces.
Online learning allows institutions to make higher education accessible to those that would otherwise not be served by traditional brick and mortar operations. Courses can reach a geographically dispersed audience, students can adapt coursework to their own personal schedules, and instructors can spend more time interacting with students rather than conveying information in unidirectional lectures (Means et al. 2013). In short, online education has excelled in bringing the classroom to students.
Even with this increased access, many aspects of the student experience and experiential learning, like study abroad, remain out of reach for many online learners. According to the 2022 EducationDynamics Online College Students report, the top three (59% of responses) pain points for those enrolling in online programs are related to finances and family and work obligations (Aslanian et al. 2022). In our own context, over 70% of students enrolled in Arizona Online are over the age of 25, and most do not have the financial means or time to participate in a traditional study abroad programs.
In this panel, we will present our response to this problem, highlighting one solution to increase opportunity and improve equity for online students. Specifically, we will discuss how we are using Virtual Reality (VR) technology to develop a new genre of virtual study abroad that can be used to bridge the access gap with respect to experiential learning opportunities for online learners. By creating access to VR study abroad programming—Arizona Online Wonders of the World Series—online learners can virtually travel to across the world and immerse themselves within new and diverse cultures. We want to shift the paradigm. Instead of bringing the classroom to students, we want to take our students to see the wonders of the world.