The Interdepartmental Center for Teaching in Virtual Reality (DIRV) is established at the University of Siena.
Participating in the Center are the following departments of the University of Siena: Department of Molecular and Developmental Medicine; Department of Physical, Earth and Environmental Sciences; Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences; Department of History and Cultural Heritage; Department of Business and Legal Studies.
The Center pursues the following purposes:
to promote innovation in educational methodologies and learning systems through virtual reality by enhancing its characteristics of immersiveness, interactivity and multisensoriality;
to allow a change not only of the distance fruition of educational content, but also to transform classroom teaching, fully realizing the model of the inverted classroom (flipped classroom), exploiting the availability of advanced digital content to allow the student to acquire knowledge independently and then deepen it in the classroom through shared experiences with the teacher;
implement Virtual Environments to support educational innovation and conduct research on virtual reality teaching;
acquire and administer a hosting and delivery platform to allow users to download and run simulations via viewer and to meet the tracking and scoring needs of virtual reality courses;
train faculty and members of academic and educational institutions to incorporate virtual environments and simulations into the classroom.