Haptic thinking; identifying haptic tooling interventions for an online design course

Project leader(s): Lisa Bowers
Theme: Technologies for STEM learning
Faculty: STEM
Status: Archived
Dates: June 2015 to January 2018

Highly Commended at the 1st eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2018 under the category – Innovative/Original Approach to Teaching.

Virtual reality (VR) is becoming an increasingly popular tool to stimulate learning in new and varied ways. However, often VR landscapes use is limited to two sensory channels e.g. sight and sound. This limitation creates barriers to learning for sight impaired students. The Open University (OU) has a history of designing accessible teaching and learning materials for all. However it was recognised, by the project leader, that OU sight impaired design students are limited to interacting with hands-on learning materials via a single sense e.g. sound.

This project hypotheses that through the inclusion of haptic VR learning tools, OU students with sight impairments, can be facilitated to better access of VR teaching tools. Thereby through this project the OU would be able to facilitate a wider sensory access to appropriate teaching and learning VR materials, and maintain a ‘student first’ approach.