Immersion and Implosion: Enabling Social Spaces through the Design of Interactivity at Scale

Abstract

The didactic lecture is a well-established but contentious practice in higher education. It is an essentially mono-directional experience delivered in purposefully designed spaces that entrench modes of learning and expected behaviours by both staff and students. This paper will challenge the ongoing primacy of the didactic lecture in higher education and posit a dialogical alternative that supports students to interact and connect at scale through the creation of social spaces. A case study of a program at the University of Sydney Business School will interrogate the role of technology in simulating an immersive hyperreality for students in large-group teaching settings that blurs the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge and the abstractions and realties of their work, life, play and learning.

Keywords

• immersion
• interactivity
• large group pedagogy
• higher education
• learning technology