Immersing Students in Ecosystems: Expanding Access and Fostering Deep Understanding

Abstract

Ecosystem ecology education requires students to comprehend complex biological, geochemical, and physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Though field trips have long been recognized as essential experiential learning tools that enhance student engagement and ecological understanding, they face significant limitations, including geographic constraints, accessibility barriers for students with mobility impairments, and scheduling conflicts arising from work, family, or military obligations. This contribution describes the implementation of immersive virtual reality modules in an upper-division ecosystem ecology course to address these limitations while maintaining the pedagogical benefits of experiential learning. Virtual reality enables students to visit diverse ecosystems—from headwater streams and kelp forests to deep-sea hydrothermal vents—that would be logistically impossible or prohibitively expensive to access through traditional field trips. Beyond addressing accessibility concerns, immersive technologies leverage embodied presence and perspective-taking to help students connect more deeply with ecosystem complexity and scale. We present our implementation approach, discuss technical and pedagogical challenges encountered, share lessons learned regarding student engagement and learning outcomes, and outline future directions for integrating VR into ecology education. Our work demonstrates that well-designed VR experiences can serve as valuable complements to traditional field-based instruction, expanding educational equity while maintaining high-quality experiential learning opportunities.