Opening up the USC CAVE

Our USC CAVE2 environment is a unique technologysupported learning environment that has the potential to enable new kinds of collaborative learning and teaching practices for many courses across the whole university. However, until recently it has been quite difficult to develop new teaching content for the CAVE because: 1. most kinds of presentations have required expert assistance and setup, and multiple trips to the CAVE to make sure that everything looks okay. This needs to be easier. 2. another obstacle to rich student engagement is that the typical mode of teaching is instructor-led – a lecturer/tutor controls the content, while all the students in the CAVE just view that content. This is fine for some styles of teaching, but is it also possible to make use of the massive screen area by allowing multiple students to interact with content at the same time, so that tutorials can be more interactive? This talk describes how the CL&T SLICE project (Student-Led In-CAVE Exploration) is working to make the CAVE2 facilities more accessible and more engaging by: 1. Making it easy for all lecturers to develop/adapt visual content for the CAVE2, so that they can use that content for tutorials and workshops in the CAVE, or in the Collaboration Studio. We have already developed simple templates and guidelines for using the CAVE, and have seen the MGT221 class of over 100 students use those tools to develop and deliver group presentations in the CAVE; 2. Improving student engagement in the CAVE, by making it more interactive –providing tools that allow multiple users to explore and interact with different kinds of visual data in the CAVE2 such as images, graphs, video and interactive web-based content. Our vision for the future is that tutorial groups of students will be able to use the CAVE to view immersive panoramas, lecture slides, videos, and interactive content. As well as watching, they will be able to use their mobile phones and tablets to move, annotate and interact with the data and programs in the CAVE. It is expected that this multi-user, multi-view environment will facilitate active learning in a constructivist framework, and that these tools will be useful in many courses at the University of Sunshine Coast