At the heart of the Ball State educational experience is what we call “immersive learning.” We ask our students to go beyond merely learning to realize the intention.
Immersive learning melds content, skills, societal need, and your interests into an experience—an intense, real-world transformative experience that results in a tangible product such as a book, DVD, or business plan. And that product lives on and has a purpose beyond the duration of the experience itself.
Immersive learning experiences at Ball State have most or all of the following characteristics:
- carry academic credit
- engage participants in an active learning process that is student-driven but guided by a faculty mentor
- produce a tangible outcome or product, such as a business plan, policy recommendation, book, play, or DVD
- involve at least one team of students, often working on a project that is interdisciplinary in nature
- include community partners and create an impact on the larger community as well as on the student participants
- focus on student learning outcomes
- help students define a career path or make connections to a profession or industry
Examples of Immersive Learning Projects
- Building Better Communities Fellows – Teams of students and faculty mentors work directly with Indiana businesses, organizations, or communities on projects that address specific problems.
- Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry – Interdisciplinary semester-long seminars engage faculty, students, and community sponsors and produce a collaborative project that sparks public discussion.
- Digital Media Institutes – Funded by a $20 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts, the Institute for Digital Entertainment and Education, and the Institute for Digital Fabrication offer students the opportunity to immerse themselves in research, learning, and practice on technology-based initiatives.
- Student Technology Incubator – The incubator supports digital technology entrepreneurs and cosponsors an annual technology business idea competition.
- Entrepreneurial Consulting Course – Students are linked with new businesses for strategic planning and business plan development.
- Community-Based Projects Program – Created by the College of Architecture and Planning, these projects combine teaching, research, and service activities.
- Capstone courses – Many majors include a capstone course that requires students to complete a comprehensive project or report. Examples include:
- the New Ventures Creation course (also called "senior sweat") for entrepreneurship majors, in which students must pitch a successful business plan to a panel of expert in order to graduate
- the two-semester computer science sequence in software engineering, in which student teams create custom software for real-world client partners
- the senior thesis/creative project for Honors College students, whose past work includes research papers, collections of short stories, exhibitions, videos, recitals, and other endeavors demonstrating their deep knowledge and passion