Rowan partners with Arizona State, education company in offering new virtual reality classes

Rowan University announced a partnership Monday with Arizona State University and a company led by filmmaker Walter Parkes to develop and license new advanced virtual reality classes that university leaders say will put it on the cutting edge of the technology’s use in higher education.

In the project with Dreamscape Learn, Rowan says it will lead the first group of universities and K-12 schools in the licensing of the new technology and curriculum, and will begin to offer courses next fall. Some of it has already been developed by Arizona State and Dreamscape Learn, while Rowan also will design new courses.

Dreamscape Learn is led by Parkes, who is the founding head of DreamWorks Studios’ motion picture division and producer of films including Men in Black and Minority Report.

The technology emphasizes teaching through exploration and “cinematic storytelling,” according to Rowan, and has shown promise in helping students from all demographic backgrounds to grasp concepts more easily.

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“This is the next generation of learning for our students that combines using the instructors’ best skills but also the latest technology,” said Tony Lowman, the New Jersey university’s provost. “You are teaching in an immersive environment rather than over a computer screen on Zoom or standing in front of a whiteboard. This is engaging students where they are, using technology that they understand.”

Rowan’s first virtual reality course under the partnership will be in biology and is expected to roll out at Rowan next fall. The class has already been developed by Dreamscape and Arizona State — ranked by U.S. News this year as the most innovative university. Other interdisciplinary courses to be developed by Rowan faculty also are expected that first year in areas such as disaster emergency management, digital humanities, and engineering and sustainability, Lowman said.

In 2022, more than 12,000 students at Arizona State participated in the course Immersive Biology in the Alien Zoo, which weaves “scientific concepts within a rich fictional world that operates on the same biochemical principles as Earth but with slightly different specifics,” Rowan said in its release.

Rowan will invest $3 million up front to build an immersive learning center as part of its Campbell Library renovation, beginning next summer. The new construction will include several pods with virtual reality headsets, sensors, and cameras that capture motion, and “haptic technology including fans, mist, and shaking mechanisms to mimic real-world sensations,” the school said. The pods will accommodate a teacher and classes of 30 students.

Starting in January, the school will open a “test bed” where faculty can start to try out some of the new technology, Lowman said.

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The university, Lowman said, anticipates also spending about a half million a year in licensing fees.

Rowan, like some other universities, already has done some classroom work in virtual reality but was looking to find a better way to offer the classes more widely at a reasonable cost, Lowman said. After a visit to Arizona State, Rowan officials became convinced that its project was the way to do that, he said.

“We realized they were having tremendous success in scaling this for introductory courses, such as bio,” he said. “They were seeing improved learning outcomes for STEM majors and non-STEM majors,” specifically in students from underrepresented groups.

Arizona State found that students who did research in the Alien Zoo labs were almost twice as likely to get an “A” as those who worked in traditional “wet labs,” Rowan said. And that was across students from all demographic backgrounds, except honors students whose work was the same in both, the university said.

“We’ve found through our research and development at ASU, that by combining highly cinematic storytelling with innovative curriculum and technology, we can create classroom experiences that motivate students to do the work necessary to master a subject,” Dreamscape Learn CEO Josh Reibel said in a statement.

Rowan expects to make its courses available for other universities to use through the Dreamscape Learn platform and recoup its costs. Students will be able to collaborate across disciplines in immersive classrooms at Rowan and around the world, Rowan leaders said.

“Our investment now means we can extend this innovative educational experience to many more students, both on our campuses and beyond,” said Rowan’s president Ali Houshmand in a statement.