The Department of Media Arts is keeping in sync with the field of interactive media by adding courses in virtual reality and offering a new Bachelor of Science in Interactive Media.
The initiative, headed by Assistant Professor Stephanie Dean, said not knowing if something is real can be an effective teaching tool.
“Our students are going to create different experiences to help you empathize, help educate. Allowing the viewer to step inside a world they’d never see or experience otherwise,” Dean said.
She says they are teaching students to create content.
“We’ve got about 18 planned courses coming that involve immersive storytelling,” Dean explained. “There’s a lot of fun game aspects to it … but also a lot of commercial aspects to it.”
Stephanie Dean
Dean has been using virtual reality as a teaching tool for years. Back in October, she presented “Virtually Gendered: How immersion and virtual embodiment can help mediate a gendered experience” in the Digital Media Studio in Walker Library. The demonstration placed participants in everyday gendered experiences and invited them to discuss the results afterward. The experience showed gender bias often present in the media.
“We have journalism students in here doing immersive journalism,” Dean said. “There are some beautiful pieces about what it means to be homeless, what it means to be a victim of domestic violence, what it’s like to be a Syrian refugee …”
Click here to watch Nashville Channel 5’s news package on MTSU’s new interactive media lab.
