Q&A: Muhsinah Morris Is Leading Morehouse College into the Metaverse - EdTech Magazine: Focus on K-12

EDTECH: How person students responded to learning successful VR?

MORRIS: Seniors who took precocious inorganic chemistry felt they would person been amended chemists if they had this successful their freshman year. In this course, you person to beryllium capable to visualize molecules and molecular geometry and recognize analyzable chemic reactions. VR helps students visualize the molecular satellite successful a mode they haven’t been capable to the full clip they’ve been studying chemistry. They get to acquisition molecules blown up to country size. They were capable to bash problem-based learning activities. A batch of them privation to spell into wellness professions, truthful they could research wrong a assemblage and look astatine anatomical structures.

EDTECH: How is VR particularly invaluable for HBCUs?

MORRIS: As an HBCU, a batch of our pedagogy is based connected culturally responsive spaces and making definite our students tin place with contented that typically doesn’t consciousness similar it’s for them. We’re creating an engaging abstraction that they privation to inhabit and that makes them consciousness comfortable.

In creating our integer duplicate of Morehouse, we augmented the abstraction with artifacts from the existent campus. In our hallways, students spot African pieces of creation and elements of past by African American radical who person done astonishing things successful their fields. We’ve created a satellite that they’re acquainted with, utilizing cutting-edge exertion to bash it.

READ MORE: How emerging technologies assistance HBCUs clasp students.

EDTECH: How tin VR grow inclusion and practice successful ways that accepted learning whitethorn not?

MORRIS: I thatch successful the acquisition section present and person taught successful the chemistry section for my full career. In my people astir exceptional learners, we speech about differentiating acquisition for the otherwise abled and utilizing technological strategies to marque definite teachers make the close accommodations.

Our students volition get an accidental to create, successful VR, scenarios that volition accommodate learners who person carnal disabilities oregon who are neurodivergent. How bash we make technological tools and solutions to accommodate their needs? How tin we make experiences that volition instill a consciousness of belonging? Being mindful of that helps teachers make pathways and beryllium much originative successful the types of activities they bring into the space.

EDTECH: How tin VR’s versatility assistance to personalize learning?

MORRIS: I telephone this offering “opportunistic reality” for our students. Extended world technologies assistance them to hope, endure and persist done analyzable materials and challenging aspects of their disciplines. Being exposed to this exertion astatine this level gives them a vantage constituent that others whitethorn not have, which is captious for young Black men, particularly those we service astatine Morehouse.

Young Black men marque up lone 2 percent of acquisition professionals. It’s captious for them to travel into the workforce knowing however to usage XR technologies and however to physique program successful XR. Having experienced it arsenic students and arsenic pre-service teachers is important. It provides opportunities that our students don’t often have. They get an accidental to develop, make and person autonomy implicit a abstraction that is connected the cutting edge.

EDTECH: What results person you seen astatine Morehouse?

MORRIS: In our past course, we saw a 10 percent constituent summation successful attendance compared with accepted face-to-face classes. We person seen a emergence successful pupil engagement and a important summation successful students’ last grades. Not lone bash students privation this benignant of technology, but the numbers amusement that it’s made a difference.

EDTECH: How other are you utilizing VR to service the field community?

MORRIS: We’ve had commencement services successful the Metaverse and a virtual gala to travel our yearly “A Candle successful the Dark” Gala, which celebrates African American accomplishment and raises assistance funds. We person Meditation Mondays, and we person fittingness initiatives coming this autumn led by our kinesiology program. We’re moving afloat steam up to springiness much students an accidental to usage this technology.

EDTECH: What makes you astir excited astir VR?

MORRIS: When I spot students recognize their fields successful a mode that drives curiosity — wherever they’re not confined to antiquated learning conditions, but alternatively they’re optimized successful this abstraction — I spot their joy. In galore cases, that portion of the acquisition strategy has been lost. When we’re young, we inquire questions due to the fact that we are genuinely curious, and arsenic we spell done the system, we suffer that, and a portion of our tone gets crushed successful that process. It’s truly bully to beryllium backmost successful a abstraction of joyousness and anticipation for students who didn’t deliberation that existed for them anymore. That is the “opportunistic reality,” not conscionable for students but besides for the faculty.

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