Australia, New Zealand and East Asia

Reality Bites is an immersive storytelling learning resource aiming to revolutionise nutrition education through Virtual Reality (VR). Combining VR with self-directed virtual journeys, students explore the human digestive system in an engaging narrative, transforming the traditional provision of dense, fact-based physiology content, into an interactive, student-centred experience. Spearheaded by a student-led development process, Reality Bites leverages cross-disciplinary expertise. Nutrition students created storyboards and computer science students converted them into VR scenarios. This collaboration resulted in a tool that nurtures highly sought skills like digital literacy and teamwork, whilst also being universally endorsed by students and nutrition experts as a engaging, memorable, and effective educational experience. Reality Bites not only augments science education at RMIT University but will broaden its educational impact through novel VR development frameworks and cross-institutional resource sharing.  It signals a new era of digital learning that emphasises active engagement and creative innovations in higher education.

Learning analytics were employed to analyse digital data generated by students when they interacted with the learning management system. The obtained data was used to generate personalised feedback emails that were sent to individual first-year students in large cohort courses, at regular time points throughout the semester. The emails included an evaluation of current performance and advice about support and learning resources available to assist their learning. Analysis showed that receiving personalised feedback emails increases the likelihood of passing the course, and fosters higher student success and positive attitudes.

Wanting to find the impact of the use of a range of LearnSci LabSims during the COVID-19 pandemic, a paper-based questionaire was distributed to students in 2019 and 2020. These were devised to interrogate the students’ experience of the laboratory through consideration of the affective domain to their learning, the cognitive load induced by the learning environment and the level of their interaction with the simulations both outside of and during the on-campus classes. 519 responses were collected in 2019 (before LabSims were utilised) and 419 collected in 2020 (after LabSims were utilised during the COVID-19 pandemic). Additionally, nine student interviews were conducted in 2020 to both validate the questionnaire and to provide depth to the analysis. The results showed that students were highly likely to repeat the LabSims until they achieved the correct answers and that they tended to recall the positive and negative feedback provided by the LabSims during class time. The majority of the students discerned positive impacts on their laboratory experience as a result of having completed the LabSims prior to class. This positive outcome was, through a thematic analysis of student responses, attributed to the ease of utilising the resources, their relatively ‘correct’ visualisation of real-world equipment/techniques and the lowering of in-class anxiety (or an inverse increase in student confidence).