How Facility Facelifts Keep Colleges Competitive Prepare Students for the Work World

John LaDisa says similar trends are happening in Marquette University‘s new Cave Automatic Visual Environment (CAVE).

The CAVE has been a huge “space-creator” asset to the university, especially for departments that could not build their own physical versions of real world work spaces.

LaDisa says Marquette’s nursing program is using the CAVE to integrate nursing students into a virtual medical environment in order to ease them into the real world medical environment.

“The College of Nursing here has a really nice simulation lab,” says LaDisa, director of the visualization lab and associate professor of biomedical engineering at Marquette. “When they were building it out, they obviously couldn’t create all of the units you’d see in a hospital or clinical setting, so they reached out to us to see if we could create some of the spaces they couldn’t physically have. The first thing we did was take an existing space that they had and recreated it virtually.”

Aside from giving its nursing students a close-to-real space to practice in, the CAVE also increased students’ learning abilities and skill development.

“We split a class, where half of the students worked in a physical environment and half the students learned in the virtual environment, and they learned identical materials from identical instructors,” LaDisa says. “They took the same skills tests and, it turns out, there was no difference in learning. In fact, we’re not sure why, but students in the virtual environment did a little bit better.”

LaDisa says one of the best benefits of the space-building and renovations trend in higher education is students are transformed into smart, skilled and ready-to-work adults.

“We’re preparing them for developing clinical skills and applying them in realistic scenarios,” he says. “That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created some things we don’t have physical versions of, different environments. Generally speaking, [that’s] more realism you can bring into a classroom.”