The College of Education is planning to make Mursion, a virtual environment technology, available to its students from next year. Mursion is a virtual reality environment where professionals practice and master the complex interpersonal skills necessary to be effective in high-stress professions, used by a wide range of innovative organizations in healthcare, education, hospitality, finance and other corporate sectors.
“Initial faculty training has already begun, and we will start to implement it with candidates in spring 2018,” Executive Director of the Trustees Education Initiative, Rebecca Watts, said.
The software delivers customized virtual reality simulations that recreate the most demanding interpersonal challenges that professionals confront on the job every day.
“This technology would provide people who are preparing to be teachers with some early experience in practicing their teaching skills and class room management skills,” Watts said. “It will really strengthen the experiences that university educator candidates have before they continue to practice and strengthen their skills in real class rooms.”
Mursion develops virtual-reality simulations, custom content and avatars that resemble the real people that a professional is likely to encounter on the job.
“Our students in the college of education need practice engaging in actual class room encounters,” Wyoming Excellence Endowed Chair in Literacy Education, Cynthia Brock, said. “Mursion allows people who are participating in it to engage in activities such as interviews with parents, much like a teacher’s experience in real life situations.”
The innovation was designed and funded by the Trustees Education Initiative (TEI). The proposal went through the TEI coordinating council and governing board and approved by the UW Board of Trustees in July 2017.
This technology is especially useful for states such as Wyoming.
“It’s really significant, because it’s not possible to place all of our pre-service teachers in an actual class room, because Laramie is a small city,” Brock said. “A program like Mursion allows our teachers to practice real classroom encounters without physically being in a real classroom. “
Pre-service teacher education is the education and training provided to student teachers before they have undertaken any teaching.
“It’s important to have a sense of what class room management requires during pre-service training and it would provide them the opportunity to practice real class room management strategies,” Sublette County School District #1 Superintendent, Jay Harnack, said. “I’m excited to see it implemented and it’s another tool university can use to prepare students to be successful.”
