Josh Reibel has spent 35 years in education technology in total, but when he was introduced to Dreamscape Learn three years ago, he was blown away and knew it was where he wanted to be.
“I felt like, Wow, this is a medium with a capability to transform what a school can be, what an educational experience can be, that is dramatically different and more intense than anything I had seen or worked on before,” says Reibel, who is now CEO of Dreamscape Learn. “I actually said to the founder, Walter Parkes, ‘What do I need to do to win you over for this opportunity?’” (Parkes also helped create DreamWorks.)
What made Dreamscape—the company that created the new virtual reality lab at St. Charles Community College—the dream job for Reibel? “There are two main things,” he says. “One is the ability of the immersive technology to truly transport students and learners into other places and spaces and times, in ways that where they have a very authentic sense of presence there.”
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For instance, when the technology virtually takes students onto the lunar surface or into an Egyptian tomb, “everything else in your life disappears,” Reibel says. “You do not check your cell phone, you’ve forgotten about the fight with the roommate or your parents or whatever, and there’s a kind of intensity of focus and belief in really being in these places that just has an ability to engage, that just goes beyond anything that a flat textbook or even a computer screen can afford.”
The other aspect that made Reibel excited about a career at Dreamscape was its innovative, reformative approach. “There’s a very strange thing that we do in schools, which is we take students out of the world that we’re supposed to be getting them excited about and engaged in and wanting to learn about, and trap them in classrooms that are really isolating kinds of environments,” he says. “This technology can reverse that; it can turn the school into a place that becomes a departure hub where, yes, the students and the instructors convene on campus, but they convene there in order to journey out to any imaginable place in the future, in the past, in the present, at any scale, atomic to cosmic.”
According to Reibel, most of education reform is often focused on the wrong problem. Instead of questioning, Should literacy be taught this way or that way?, Reibel argues that before anything else, we should ask, How do we get and sustain the attention, will, interest, and belief of the students in the first place? “So many things become less important once the student really cares and wants to learn,” he says. “And if there’s one thing that Dreamscape is focused on in a more interesting way than most anything else I’ve seen, it’s that. How do we make school as binge-worthy as the Netflix series that students are addicted to? How do we get them to be so excited to find out what happens next that they lean into the work with the same sort of vigor and intensity that we all bring to our hobbies?”
Dreamscape Learn launched its first virtual reality platform at Arizona State University in 2019. Building on the program’s success there, the company plans to expand across the country, including multiple schools in Missouri, across various grade levels and content areas.
The lab’s first launch in the metro area, at St. Charles Community College, focuses on STEM education and was introduced to students this semester. “At St. Charles, they admit pretty much everybody, so they have students reading at a third-grade level, and there are students at St. Charles who could be at a highly selective four-year university and everything in between,” Reibel explains as the reason that the company chose the school. “A lot of what we do is about, How do you get that diverse range of students to be as close to equally successful as they can be in college-level coursework?… It’s a very useful incubation site for figuring out, How do we design this stuff so that it’s really optimal for as broad and diverse a student population as could be?”
The company’s ASU efficacy study revealed that the traditionally large achievement gaps between high-performing and lower-performing demographic groups have almost been eliminated. “The honors college students are doing great, but so are the underrepresented students that, historically, have really struggled in the intro stage. Everybody’s getting As, and they’re not getting As because it’s easy; it’s actually a harder program than what it replaced—but it’s just delivered in a totally different way.”
That delivery involves pivoting from an emphasis on learning how to use lab tools to focusing on general scientific literacy, quantitative reasoning skills, and fundamental life science knowledge, which are transferable and will help students succeed in subsequent and more advanced related work. This manifests in multiple STEM modules in a single course, each of which that has a story-driven narrative that unfolds over a handful of weeks.
“The basic structure is students go out into the field, virtually, in headset, for 10- to 15-minute segments, where they encounter a fascinating and troubling problem, collect data from the field—just like any field scientist would—so they can go back to the ‘bench,’ back to the lab, and begin to learn the math and science,” Reibel says. “They need to figure out what could be causing this problem. And like any good story, there are typically red herrings and twists and turns and suspense and all of the things that get people emotionally connected to a narrative, and really want to find out what the answer is.”
Students test hypotheses, return to the virtual reality headset to see the results of their experiments play out, and then go back to adjust their math and science a few times before finding the complex answer.
“Your first day in a normal chemistry class was probably either a lecture, or you were told to go read the first chapter of the textbook and do a problem set at the end,” Reibel says. “In the Dreamscape version, you come into the immersive center, put on the headset, and find yourself flying a turbocopter through the foothills of the Himalayas, and you land at a remote farming village and realize that the local yak herd is clearly ill and suffering. [From there,] you have to learn a lot of chemistry and a lot of math in order to figure out what is making them ill, and then, how to solve that problem without causing other kinds of problems. It is very narrative, very cinematic, and puts the students in the position of being practicing scientists and needing to learn a lot of science in order to play out their role in the story.”
The future of Dreamscape involves scaling up, including increasing accessibility through mobile trailer and cart versions, as well as software developer kits that will allow educators to build their own lessons. “The ultimate goal is to have a whole exchange where folks from one school build something that’s relevant to sustainability, and somebody builds something over here that’s relevant to poetry, and they can exchange them, forming a robust app store and marketplace,” Reibel explains. “We’re in the earliest stages of doing that, but we want to cultivate a large and productive developer ecosystem so that we’re not creating all of it ourselves, and so that the platforms are being leveraged across as many curricular areas as possible.”
Reibel says that as AI capability evolves, Dreamscape will be able to build great things faster, cheaper, and more dynamically. “This is really about reimagining what a school and a school experience can be, and I think in education, we often forget that, because the students are in some sense obligated to be there, that we have them trapped and we have their attention,” Reibel says. “This technology has an amazing ability to help us rethink how we get students to care. Having them sitting in the classrooms, seeming like they’re sort of engaged, is not enough… It’s obviously thrilling when students take the headset off, and they’re like, ‘Wow, that was incredible.’ But the more exciting thing is when they won’t leave a three-hour lab where they’re hovered over an Excel spreadsheet, because they’re so motivated that they don’t want to leave until they get this right… This is not a lesson—we’re trying to make a deep and powerful and emotionally compelling experience out of school.”
