(World) Building Transformation: Students and Teachers as CoCreators in OpenXR Learning Environments

Abstract: Emerging extended reality (XR) tools and platforms offer an exciting opportunity to align learning experiences in higher education with the futures in which students will pursue their goals. However, the dynamic nature of XR as subject matter challenges hierarchies and classroom practices typical of higher education. This instructional design practice paper reflects on how our team of faculty, learning experience designers, and user experience (UX) researchers implemented human-centered design thinking, transformative learning, and problem-posing education to design and implement a special topics media entrepreneurship course in building the metaverse. By pairing our practitioner experience with learner personas, as well as survey, interview, and focus group responses from our learners, we narrate our design and its implications through a human-centered, reflective lens.