Publications
Partners
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) has found the perfect solution for those first-year students struggling with concepts and terminologies for learning anatomy and physiology.
Imagine “seeing” a heart in front of you and being able to study it from all sides, with a lecturer helping you along the way.
This is exactly what students are able to do with the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies used by the university’s faculty of community health sciences (CHS).
“We found they were struggling to grasp concepts and terminology regarding human biology, anatomy, physiology, the medical bio-sciences,” Professor Simone Titus, a Learning and Teaching Specialist at CHS’s Interprofessional Education Unit (IPEU), who heads the initiative, explained.
“Students fresh from high school do anatomy and physiology because those are the cornerstones of health professional education for programmes such as physiotherapy, nursing, occupational therapy and all of related professions that we train.”
The beginning
The faculty has been tapping into this technology for the last few years. Titus and her colleagues then realised there was much room available to develop learning activities using educational technology such as virtual 3D worlds, and the faculty could function better within these spaces.
“I was thinking of innovative ways to teach anatomy and physiology to make it fun,” she said. “We call it ‘edutainment’. And to make it understandable for students in an interactive way, in a manner that they can access information seamlessly.”
Subsequently the faculty partnered with Dr Omowunmi Isafiade of the Department of Computer Sciences, the EON Reality group as well as Laurent de Laroche Souvestre, a consultant, to develop their AR and VR platforms for teaching and learning purposes.
“It’s all about ensuring students have this multi-model approach to accessing content.”
Titus successfully applied for a research grant from the National Research Foundation to look at the students’ perception of AR/VR in class using some of the assets they had built.
“Students had a positive reaction towards the initiative. However, they were quickly aware of some of the pitfalls,” Titus said.
“Students are interested in this type of technology, which is great. But they are also aware that if it is disconnected, they feel a lecture is needed. It is not only about implementing VR in class; it also ensures the lecturer is learning. We are also aware that physiologically, not all students can engage in VR. With technology some people may feel dizzy, and being immersed in a virtual space may not be better for some students. In that case we ensured they are not always immersed in virtual reality but can access 3D assets on a desktop and still manipulate the objects that are also in AR.”
