ELEVATE UCC wins prestigious DELTA Award

3 Jun 2021

ELEVATE, an interdisciplinary team of academics, staff and students received the prestigious DELTA Award (Disciplinary Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Assessment) from the National Forum for designing, developing and integrating new modalities of teaching for understanding, guided by digitised immersive learning approaches.

ELEVATE is a collaboration between the Schools of Microbiology, Computer Science and Information Technology, and the Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL).

ELEVATE designed scalable immersive virtual learning environments for students to interact and engage with spatial models of molecular entities (e.g. SARS-CoV-2, the human cell, plasmids), concepts and processes (e.g. endocytosis, and plasmid electroporation). Students can interact with the virtual environment using a range of technologies from a mobile phone up to and including a fully immersive VR headset.

MSc Interactive Media students, Grace McEvoy and Christine Walsh co-designed and developed the 3D models and immersive environments, with the assistance of Billy O’Mahony (MAVRIC Lab) and David Murphy of the School of Computer Science and Information Technology.

The system has now been integrated in to two modules in Microbiology and it is envisaged that it will be further developed to include more components and concepts, and used in other modules and degrees.

The official announcement of the Award can be found here:

 https://www.teachingandlearning.ie/2021/05/25/teams-from-mtu-ucc-and-ul-receive-delta-awards/

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Further information on the MSc Interactive Media can be found here:

https://www.ucc.ie/en/ckr05/