Dive Brief:
- The University of San Diego's IT department has created the World Interactive Study Environment to allow students to drop pins from their locations anywhere in the world and add photos, videos, and comments to a collaborative class discussion.
- The WISE platform will be piloted this summer by a class of 10 students going to London to study art history, and it has been used since its launch in 2015 to study social science in low-income neighborhoods as well as document trips to the local farmers market.
- The development team is currently working to create native Android and iOS versions of the platform, which runs with Google’s App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Maps.
Dive Insight:
The USD team is planning to enhance the platform with feedback from early adopters. It is also considering marketing the tool for sale. The possibilities for location-based learning are great. Higher education is being challenged to make lessons more interactive than ever as generations that have grown up in the digital age make their way to campuses across the country. Colleges and universities are finding ways to let students and faculty communicate in and out of class with specialized platforms like TopHat, Echo360, and others. WISE encourages these conversations based on real-world experiences that draw course content out of the classroom and bring it to life.