Designing a Virtual Health Faculty Hub

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the design of a 360-degree virtual environment experience for Health School students to explore seven university health disciplines within the School of Clinical Science. This teaching approach uses the Seekbeak 360-degree online platform to create a virtual environment and a rhizomatic learning pedagogy to encourage participatory and negotiated community engagement. Participants engage with a 360-degree virtual scene that allows exploration of each of the health disciplines. This allows the student to experience core competencies and example environments for each discipline via a centralised single hub. Informed by a Design-Based Research methodology we discuss the first prototype stage of the virtual health hub that has been developed using Seekbeak. The virtual health faculty hub aims to create an inexpensive mobile BYOD immersive environment for 578 first year Health School students to explore and experience the health teams with whom they will collaborate in real world situations upon graduation.