Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards:  Exploring ‘the Alien Zoo.’
02: Roadside Attractions: As courses close.

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01: Postcards

This isn’t your grandma’s biology class.

Sit down, and you feel your chair vibrate as you explore a world of dinosaur-like creatures, a surreal ecosystem that feels like a cross between “Jurassic Park” and “Avatar.” Soon, the beautiful settings give way to a troubling reality, when a “spotted glider” falls dead at your side — and just like that, you are asked to become a field biologist, dissecting the glider’s lungs to discover a cancerous tumor.

This is just a small glimpse at the Alien Zoo, an immersive biology course built through a collaborative venture between Arizona State University and Dreamscape Immersive, the virtual reality studio led by Hollywood producer Walter Parkes. 

The Dreamscape Learn program has served more than 25,000 ASU students since it was launched in 2022. Initial studies showed that students who participated in the VR experience were nearly twice as likely to achieve an A grade in their introductory biology course. And now it’s expanding beyond Arizona, in ways that could uniquely benefit rural students by exposing them to new career paths and learning experiences.

Last month, St. Charles Community College announced it would become the first community college in the Midwest to adopt the program. While based in the St. Louis suburbs, the college sees VR experiences like this one as a critical part of their outreach to students from the rural counties in its service area.

“We can provide opportunities that are just more interactive and alive for those students,” says Amy Koehler, the college’s chief academic officer. “Everything from being able to travel to space, see the Sistine Chapel, or be in the Oval Office, listening to a former president talk to you about that time period.” 

For more than a decade, St. Charles has been looking for ways to better serve its many first generation and rural students. In 2010, it launched a program that has since helped more than 1,200 students from its extended service area high schools through the placement testing and college application process. Next fall, it will launch its new Regional Innovation Center, a 55-acre campus that will host programs in everything from battery technology and renewable energy to robotics and autonomous vehicles. 

It’s not alone in its pursuit of VR in the classroom. This has been a years-long trend in higher ed, as university leaders look to expand the learning experiences available to students and help them tackle sometimes abstract concepts.

One community college in Houston is promising to incorporate augmented reality in every one of its nearly 100 programs, as our reporter Miranda Dunlap wrote for Open Campus partner Houston Landing this week. But there are still important components to consider, such as centering learning objectives and ensuring students’ privacy is protected. 

At St. Charles, AR/VR tools will allow welding students to practice their cuts without wasting metal, a significant savings that makes the program more cost-effective for the college. Already, many of its students use simulated environments to train for operating forklifts or commercial driving. 

Taking advantage of augmented environments has been a hallmark for St. Charles since the early 2000s, when it first started adopting simulated hospital settings to teach everything from pediatrics to geriatrics (it now has eight such medical simulation rooms).

While the Dreamscape Learn program will begin with just biology, its software development kit (SDK) will allow the college’s faculty to create their own VR courses, too. 

Koehler says they already have plans to develop courses that show freshman seminar students how to access support resources on campus. Career exploration classes are in the works too, giving students a glimpse at what their future work day could look like — and maybe giving them valuable information about which pathways they don’t want to pursue.

“If you’re not sure about wanting to be a law enforcement officer, you could experience a few minutes of a real-life scenario and decide whether it’s for you. You may find out what it’s really like to work in a lab all day as a researcher, or maybe you think you want to be a first responder, then discover you’re not so good with blood.”

Merced College, a rural community college in the Central Valley of California, is in the middle of its first semester using the Dreamscape Learn technology. Chris Vitelli, its president, says the program has been powerful for the school’s students, many of whom are Latino and come from farmworker families. 

“It takes those who aren’t as interested in the hard sciences and introduces them to an emotional part of learning in a way that only Hollywood can,” Vitelli says.

At Merced, students pair the VR experience with labs and classroom sessions where they reflect on their experience and analyze the data gathered from their virtual excursions. Reflecting on the partnership, Vitelli adds that such augmented realities could play an important part in engaging students from under-represented backgrounds. 

“As you go through this process, you’re engulfed in a completely different world, and learning in a context that is different for all the students,” Vitelli says. “From an equity angle, this “Alien Zoo” creates an even playing field.”

02: Roadside Attractions

• Deep cuts. Beginning with the closure of an acclaimed blues program at Delta State University in Mississippi, this episode of the College Uncovered podcast from GBH and The Hechinger Report explores the troubling effects of rural majors and programs being shut down across the country. 

  • The episode features Molly Minta, our reporter at Mississippi Today. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a rural reporting project we did in collaboration with the Hechinger Report.

• Storied roots. As Blackfeet Community College celebrates a half-century as a tribal college, this Flathead Beacon article explores how it has adapted to better serve its students’ needs through workforce certification and micro-credentialing initiatives from solar installation to commercial driving.

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