Online@BSE: Beyond Zoom to a new kind of immersive digital learning

O@BSE will now take this work to the next level.

As Interim Dean Edley had proposed, the new O@BSE classes to be offered will meet serious needs in California and give people around the country and world new access to Berkeley’s wealth of intellectual talent, scholarship, as well as cutting-edge pedagogy. For instance, in collaboration with the BSE’s School Psychology program, three courses as part of the Bilingual Certificate for School Psychologists will be offered this June. Other classes on the horizon include those necessary for credentialed teachers to teach in California’s Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK); critical approaches to using AI for teaching and learning; and professional development courses for afterschool and expanded learning educators.

These BSE classes will be taught from the newly built immersive virtual classroom — a literal first among schools of education nationwide — that provides a more immersive teaching and learning experience; a dynamic alternative to the sit-and-stare-at-screen environment popularized by the Zoom classroom. The professor or instructor, for example, will teach from the classroom in front of a wall of monitors of students in squares state-of-the-art responsive audio and video technology will allow for interactions with learners in ways that create a type of in-person presence that is not possible with mainstream video-conferencing.

In addition to creating the infrastructure for online and hybrid courses, the O@BSE team — which consists of an intergenerational and interdisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate research assistants — will also conduct qualitative and quantitative research on the online teaching and learning practices. Berkeley School of Education will be positioned to contribute to how teaching occurs in online spaces, addressing questions that were pertinent before the pandemic and even more so now.

“Currently, our research attends to how instructors might consider the interplay of physical, technological, social, and pedagogical processes in order to build a sense of community and belonging in the classroom and create meaningful and transformational learning experiences,” said Meg Everett, who in addition to serving as a graduate student researcher on the project, coordinates implementation and research efforts of the Immersive Virtual Classroom.

Everett and a team of undergraduate researchers are currently analyzing data analytics, as well as data from interviews and focus groups in order to gain insight on how students use the features of the Immersive Virtual Classroom to collaborate and engage with each other, while grappling with academic content in meaningful ways.

Hull and Lizárraga emphasize the importance of work that combines innovation, creation, practice, collaboration, and research. They agree that collaboration with colleagues is essential in pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

For example, the team is simultaneously working with several other BSE projects, including:

• Kate Perry and Alejandra Ojeda-Beck in offering a fully online Bilingual School Psychology Certificate;
• Professor Kris Gutiérrez in designing learning that centers equity;
• Assistant Dean of Leadership Development Programs Rebecca Cheung in meeting the needs of education leaders and districts in regard to California’s Universal Transitional Kindergarten Professor Bruce Fuller in developing innovative early childhood education content;
• Mara Welsh Mahmood and John Cano of University-Community Links (UC Links) in the development of a cutting-edge certificate in afterschool and expanded learning.

Berkeley School of Education professors and instructors will be the ones teaching the courses offered by O@BSE.

“What we want to do is figure out how to use the affordances of tools to do things we can’t even do in person,” said Hull. “We want to push the envelope of what we want to do pedagogically and technologically, of what we can do online.”