![\"Virtual](\"https:\/\/blogs.nmc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/5c0ea6900a0a00b800151222b467bf37Virtual-Reality-Jim-Bensley-2.jpg\")
On Tuesday afternoon, Alex Bernier<\/strong> toured the length and breadth of Africa, from Egypt’s pyramids to the east-central Serengeti renowned for wildlife to South Africa’s Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years in prison. And he did it all within his two-hour World Cultures class, inside NMC’s Beckett Building, simply by putting on a virtual reality headset.<\/p>\n“It’s fantastic,” Bernier said of the technology, marveling at the improvement from elementary school, when his teachers rolled in TVs on carts.<\/p>\n
Students download Google Expeditions, a free app, to their phones, and place the phones into the headsets, which offer a three-dimensional perspective — standing on the edge of Zambia’s Victoria Falls, for instance, or in the sightlines of a gorilla in Serengeti National Park. Instructor Jim Bensley<\/strong> serves as the guide, choosing where students will explore. This week’s whirlwind African tour also showed them the Namibian desert and slave monuments in Senegal.<\/p>\n “We’re trying to stay on the cutting edge of content delivery by using technology to enhance the subject matter,” Bensley said. “We use it to enhance that learning, to immerse the students into a landscape where those cultures exist.”<\/p>\n Students were unanimously enthusiastic.<\/p>\n