Provost announces XR initiative to spur collaboration, innovation

The University of Michigan will
advance its work in extended reality, or XR, through a major campuswide
initiative announced Sept. 16 by Provost Martin Philbert.

The three-year funded commitment
led by the Center for Academic Innovation will leverage emerging XR
technologies to strengthen the quality of a Michigan education, cultivate an
interdisciplinary scholarly community of practice, and enhance a nationwide
network for academic innovation.

“Our commitment to academic
excellence is longstanding,” Philbert said. “The XR initiative will provide
significant opportunities to explore how these new technologies can bolster
excellence — in student learning, in new research possibilities and in serving
the world more effectively.”

XR encompasses augmented reality,
virtual reality, mixed reality and other variations of these forms of
computer-generated real and virtual combined environments and human-machine
interactions.

Philbert charged the Center for
Academic Innovation with establishing and facilitating the new priorities, to
seed new projects and experiments that integrate XR into residential and online
curricula, and to create innovative public-private partnerships to develop new XR-related
educational technology.

“XR applied thoughtfully in an
educational context has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach
and learn,” said James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation
and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation. “We are
eager to explore possible breakthrough innovations that enhance teaching and
learning across disciplines, foster equity and inclusivity, and increase access
and affordability.”

A new XR Innovation Fund will
provide the U-M community access to financial and in-kind support for new
innovative projects.

The center will work closely with
units across campus and across disciplines to fully understand the potential
for these new technologies to enhance learning. Many faculty and academic units
are already thinking deeply about these technologies, DeVaney said.

In fact, U-M faculty are using the technology across various disciplines to treat and diagnose illnesses, test cars of the future, teach students in the sciences why architectural structures fail, help those in education practice teaching before stepping into a classroom full of youngsters, and allow students in the Department of Film, Television, and Media to take a look at the work of Orson Welles through a different lens. 

“An important part of this project,
which will set it apart from experiments with XR on many other campuses, is our
interest in humanities-centered perspectives to shape innovations in teaching
and learning at a great liberal arts institution,” said Sara Blair, vice
provost for academic and faculty affairs, and the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate
Professor of English Language and Literature.

“How can we use XR tools and
platforms to help our students develop historical imagination or to help
students consider the value and limits of empathy, and the way we produce
knowledge of other lives than our own?

“We hope that arts and humanities
colleagues won’t just participate in this (initiative), but lead in developing
deeper understandings of what we can do with XR technologies, as we think
critically about our engagements with them.”

Joanna Millunchick, associate dean
for undergraduate education at the College of Engineering and professor of
materials science and engineering, is working with augmented reality in her
courses to help students better understand crystal structures at the molecular
scale. She believes the technology has the potential to impact STEM — science,
technology, engineering and mathematics — retention.

“The language of the STEM fields is
math. But for many students, math is too abstract and not linked to the
physical world,” Millunchick said. “Using XR in the classroom could bridge that
gap in ways that is not currently possible.”

At present, an interdisciplinary
team of faculty from several U-M departments, led by the School of Information,
is working on an augmented, virtual and mixed reality graduate certification
that provides advanced training and research in computer-generated
technologies.

Through the XR Initiative, U-M will
explore additional curricular and co-curricular offerings, research
opportunities, and multi-institutional and industry collaborations, said James
Hilton, vice provost for academic innovation.

“XR is exciting because it has the
potential to touch all of the disciplines at Michigan,” he said. “While it will
initially be physically located in the Duderstadt Center, in order to take
advantage of the VR technology and expertise that is already there, the scope
of the initiative is campuswide and builds on Michigan’s long-standing
commitment to continually ask, ‘What’s next?’ — to experiment with leading edge
technology to discover how it may change the ways we learn, create and educate
in our third century.”

The center has named Jeremy Nelson
as director of the XR Initiative. Nelson, a graduate of the College of
Engineering, returns to U-M from the health care and public sectors where he
worked to leverage innovative technology to solve customer problems.

Most recently, Nelson was a
managing partner at Afia, an Ann Arbor-based health care consulting firm he
co-founded in 2007. Prior to Afia, Nelson was the chief information architect
at the Washtenaw Community Health Organization.

A first objective for Nelson will
be to engage a wide range of stakeholders across and beyond campus, DeVaney
said.

“We are embarking on the next great
shift in how human beings interact with technology and use it to alter the
future,” Nelson said. “The XR Initiative will be an inflection point for the
University of Michigan to continue to lead and engage the world to solve the
problems that matter most.”