In an Igloo webinar, Sunderland College’s Gerard Elder showed how interactivity can mean much more than clicking or touching. Students move, choose, respond, investigate, teach – and even create the experience themselves. 

In Sunderland College’s two award-winning, Igloo-powered immersive spaces, interactivity can mean many different things. It may involve physically committing to a point of view, responding to an incident in front of 41,000 football fans, investigating a crime scene – or creating your own immersive experience. 

But none of these things depend on bespoke software, hardware or immersive content. They are possible in any Igloo-powered immersive space. That was one of the key lessons to emerge from our recent Igloo webinar with Gerard Elder, Immersive Learning Lead at Sunderland College.

Part of Education Partnership North East, Sunderland College provides further and higher education, while also working with local schools and community partners. That broad remit has given Gerard and his colleagues plenty of opportunities to explore what ‘interactive’ can actually mean.  

 

Interactivity starts with the learner 

One of Gerard’s starting principles is wonderfully straightforward: “The best lessons are where students are active.” That has led the team at Sunderland to look for simple ways of getting students out of their seats and involved in what is happening around them. 

Sometimes it involves little more than putting choices around the immersive space and asking students to move towards the answer or opinion they agree with. In one animal-themed activity, for example, choices were projected directly on the floor, and students stood on their preferred spot. 

There was no sophisticated interactive application behind it. The students themselves provided the interaction. And physically committing to an answer changes the dynamic. Their choice is visible. They can explain it. Others can question it. A straightforward quiz becomes a shared activity rather than something completed individually. 

Practice changes when the pressure feels real 

At other times, the interaction is considerably more demanding.  

Working with Sunderland AFC, the college captured a real match-day environment at the Stadium of Light in 360°, in front of around 41,000 spectators. That footage became the backdrop for spectator-safety training. Learners entered the immersive space wearing high-vis jackets, while performing-arts students played spectators and presented them with situations they had to deal with. There was crowd noise. Stadium music. Unpredictability. And the learners had to make decisions and respond under pressure.  

As Gerard puts it: “They had to demonstrate their learning in those kind of more real conditions.” The immersive environment wasn’t simply illustrating the place where their skills might eventually be used. It created conditions in which those skills could be practised. “You could never create that in a classroom,” Gerard says. 

Sunderland also thinks about what can happen before students enter the room. A visit to the Houses of Parliament might begin with a simulated security check. A music-festival experience might involve issuing and checking tickets. Small touches, but they encourage people to participate more actively in the premise of the session. 

Learners can become the experts 

One of Sunderland’s most ambitious examples turns participation into something deeper. 

The college works with Northumbria Police and local schools on a programme helping young people understand the consequences of knife crime. Local school pupils spend a week learning from real police officers, taking on roles including detective, forensic specialist and crime-scene investigator. A real case provides the basis for an immersive reconstruction, and pupils must examine the evidence and work out for themselves what happened. 

Gerard recalls watching twelve-year-olds interpret the scene and explain their conclusions to adults.  

“They were teaching me” he says. And that idea has become important to him – pupils teaching other pupils, and sometimes students teaching adults. 

For one participant, the experience went further still. After watching her work through the forensic exercise, Gerard asked whether she had ever considered doing it professionally. Her response was: “I think I know what I want to be.” When Gerard spoke to her some weeks later, she was still interested in pursuing that kind of career. 

By this point, the learner is doing considerably more than interacting with content. They are taking responsibility for the experience. 

Creating is another form of participation 

Gerard is equally keen that students should get behind the scenes. He recognises a temptation that can come with any significant technology investment. To protect it. Keep control of it. Leave its operation to the specialists. His advice is the opposite: “Let the students have a go. Let the students take ownership.” 

One story captures that perfectly. At a parents’ evening, one student brought his parents into the immersive space to see the work he had created. “Come into my Igloo,” he told them. Gerard noticed the possessive immediately. The student didn’t see himself simply as a user of the space. He had taken ownership of it.  

Students don’t need to become specialist immersive-content producers to reach that point. Sunderland uses a mixture of approaches. Sometimes the team films with high-end 360° cameras. Sometimes students capture and edit material themselves. Sometimes ordinary high-resolution images taken on a phone are enough for someone to build a story around and demonstrate what they have learned. 

Gerard says the biggest content source they use is self-made material, supplemented by existing resources from sources including Pexels, Pixabay and YouTube. Students can also create 3D spaces, step inside what they have designed and explain their decisions to their peers. In vocational education, that can turn content creation itself into part of the learning – designing a space, testing an idea and communicating the thinking behind it. 

Design the lesson around action 

As it has become more familiar and comfortable with its immersive spaces, Sunderland’s approach has evolved. Gerard recalls that, in the early days, a request for an immersive lesson about an elderly-care setting might result in the team finding a suitable 360° image and simply putting it around the room. His assessment now is succinct: “It didn’t work very well.” 

Today, the process starts with a conversation. The technologist and teacher look at the whole intention of the lesson and consider what the immersive environment could enable them to do differently. Could students make decisions? Could they be given a role? Could the session create some pressure or drama? Could movement or other senses add something useful? 

Gerard describes an immersive lesson as “a story with a beginning and a middle and an end”. The learning outcomes remain the anchor, but the lesson is redesigned around what the space enables students to do, rather than transferred into it scene by scene. 

And perhaps that is the useful distinction. Interactivity doesn’t have to mean adding more interactive technology. At Sunderland, it can mean giving learners more agency – a decision to make, a situation to handle, a problem to investigate, something to create and, often, a space they feel is their own. 

 

Want to watch the full webinar? Get in touch now → 

 

Want to read an in-depth case study on Sunderland’s Igloo-powered set-up? Take a look → 

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