The University of Michigan (U-M) will advance its work in extended reality (XR) through a major campus-wide initiative announced by Provost Martin Philbert in a press release. The three-year funded commitment, led by the Center for Academic Innovation, will leverage emerging XR technologies to “strengthen the quality of a Michigan education, cultivate an interdisciplinary scholarly community of practice, and enhance a nationwide network for academic innovation,” according to the press release.

“Our commitment to academic excellence is longstanding,” Philbert said. “The XR initiative will provide significant opportunities to explore how these new technologies can bolster excellence – in student learning, in new research possibilities and in serving the world more effectively.”

Philbert charged the Center for Academic Innovation with establishing and facilitating the new priorities, to seed new projects and experiments that integrate XR into residential and online curricula, and to create innovative public-private partnerships to develop new XR-related educational technology. A new XR Innovation Fund will provide the U-M community access to financial and in-kind support for new projects.

The center has named Jeremy Nelson as director of the XR Initiative. Nelson, a graduate of the College of Engineering, returns to U-M from the health care and public sectors where he worked to leverage innovative technology to solve customer problems. Most recently, Nelson was a managing partner at Afia, an Ann Arbor-based health care consulting firm he co-founded in 2007. Prior to Afia, Nelson was the chief information architect at the Washtenaw Community Health Organization.

“We are embarking on the next great shift in how human beings interact with technology and use it to alter the future,” Nelson said. “The XR Initiative will be an inflection point for the University of Michigan to continue to lead and engage the world to solve the problems that matter most.”

XR Educating Students Across Disciplines

According to the university, the center will work closely with units across U-M’s campus and across disciplines to fully understand the potential for these new technologies to enhance learning. James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation, noted that many faculty and academic units are already thinking deeply about these technologies.

“XR applied thoughtfully in an educational context has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach and learn,” said DeVaney. “We are eager to explore possible breakthrough innovations that enhance teaching and learning across disciplines, foster equity and inclusivity, and increase access and affordability.”

The university notes that faculty are already using XR across various disciplines to treat and diagnose illnesses, test cars of the future, teach architectural stability, empower educational students to practice leading a classroom, and allow students in the Department of Film, Television, and Media to take a look at the work of Orson Welles through a different lens. 

“An important part of this project, which will set it apart from experiments with XR on many other campuses, is our interest in humanities-centered perspectives to shape innovations in teaching and learning at a great liberal arts institution,” said Sara Blair, vice provost for academic and faculty affairs, and the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature. “How can we use XR tools and platforms to help our students develop historical imagination or to help students consider the value and limits of empathy, and the way we produce knowledge of other lives than our own?”

Joanna Millunchick, associate dean for undergraduate education at the College of Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, is working with augmented reality (AR) in her courses to help students better understand crystal structures at the molecular scale. She believes the technology has the potential to impact STEM retention.

“The language of the STEM fields is math. But for many students, math is too abstract and not linked to the physical world,” Millunchick said. “Using XR in the classroom could bridge that gap in ways that is not currently possible.”

At present, an interdisciplinary team of faculty from several U-M departments, led by the School of Information, is working on an augmented, virtual and mixed reality graduate certification that provides advanced training and research in computer-generated technologies.

“XR is exciting because it has the potential to touch all of the disciplines at Michigan,” said James Hilton, vice provost for academic innovation. “The scope of the initiative is campus-wide and builds on Michigan’s long-standing commitment to continually ask, ‘What’s next?’ – to experiment with leading edge technology to discover how it may change the ways we learn, create, and educate in our third century.”

The University of Michigan’s commitment to promoting XR in higher education demonstrates its potential for making the abstract or larger-than-life digestible for students. Other universities have also made strides in XR research, such as Stanford University’s study in how AR affects human behavior and the University of Cambridge’s custom-developed AR headset was able to mitigate the negative side effects that users face.

“The future of education, digitally, to me looks like immersive teleportation systems in which students from around the world can come together to congregate,” said Christopher Lafayette, founder of The Armada and Immersive Directory and 3E Insider, when making the case for virtual reality (VR) education. “Where a teacher is no longer limited to the space and size of their classrooms, but could arguably teach a class in VR with over 100,000 students from around the world in real-time in attendance.”