The world is your classroom

Immersive learning isn't just for college credit; it changes lives and teaches real world, hands-on experience

By Dawn Araujo

Senior architecture major Johanna Ofner wakes up at 6 a.m. She makes her way through the bungalow and toward breakfast: mung beans and coconut with red chili paste. Like everyone around her, she scoops the food into her mouth with her hands. After taking a cold shower — there’s no hot water — Ofner and her roommates head off to class, but class isn’t in a lecture hall. It’s in the tsunami-ravaged landscape of Sri Lanka.

Ofner spent the Spring 2008 semester doing an immersive learning experience called CapAsia. The program allows students in the College of Architecture and Planning to get a first-hand look at development issues in Southeast Asia. For Ofner, the experience was life changing.

“I’m thinking about more studying development on a larger scale, like international development,” she says. “So now, in my classes, I think I have a much different perspective on what the importance of architecture really is. I don’t really feel that designing a big monument — it doesn’t seem as important to me as solving other problems. But I still think architecture has the power to solve all those problems but not necessarily for me anymore.”

According to the Ball State University Web site, experiences like these are at the heart of education.

“We ask our students to go beyond merely learning to realize the intention,” the site reads.

But not everyone is so quick to sing the praises of immersive learning.

Dr. David LeBlanc, a Ball State biology professor, says the university’s current definition of an immersive experience is too limiting.

“For many faculty, the difficulty has to do with the fact that several of the criteria are difficult to do. And that differs by college,” he says. “For us, it’s that you must have an external client. In the sciences, your immersive experience is independent scientific research. There’s no outside client. We’re not a business.”

Yet LeBlanc is not opposed to the idea of immersive learning. He says the immersive experiences at the Virginia Ball Center and the business college were the original models for immersive learning. He says they work because they are fundamentally suited to fit the criteria.

“Those experiences that meet all the criteria are wonderful. They are life-changing experiences for the students involved,” he says. “The problem is how to implement that with a large number of students. And in my opinion, it can’t be done.”

Dr. Melinda Messineo, a Ball State University sociology professor, taught one of the Virginia Ball immersive learning experiences. Her students produced a play from a graphic novel. She says that for her, the experience was liberating, exciting and scary.

“Immersive learning changes the relationship between the student and the instructor,” she says. “You’re no longer the sage on the stage, you’re the guide on the side. It’s no longer a question of ‘You do your work, and I’ll tell you how you did.’ It’s ‘We need to have a project at the end of this, and we’ll keep going until it’s an A.’”

However, Messineo does agree with LeBlanc in regard to the difficulties some colleges face in creating an immersive experience.

“I think any department, in a pure sense, could do immersive learning. But there’s a resource reality,” she says. “For instance, an immersive learning experience needs to be more than three credit hours. But many departments don’t have the luxury of assigning six hours to an instructor for just 20 students.”

But Messineo rejects the idea that a lack of external partners is an obstacle.

“Whatever we do should have community relevance,” she says. “Even pure science has relevance to the community.”

And community is what immersive learning is supposed to be all about. The idea is to make the world a classroom. And for Ofner, that’s exactly what happened. She says she has a better perspective of her own life and a clearer view of how the world works. And when asked if she would do it again, she replies: “In a heartbeat.”