Immersive Learning

One of Ball State’s somewhat infamous taglines is “Immersive Learning.”  In fact, there’s an entire section of the BSU Website on it – you can check it out here!

Immersive Learning, as Ball State’s Website states, is at “the heart of a Ball State education.”  It’s all about bringing students together from across campus to work on a project that benefits the local community.  Besides making a difference in a business or organization, Immersive Learning projects provide opportunities for students to build their resumes with real-world experience.

So far in my career at Ball State, I’ve already been involved in two Immersive projects.  From my perspective, what seems to occur sometimes is that classes are turned into Immersive experiences.  That’s what happened in two of my classes!  There are also numerous projects you can sign up for too.  I would recommend signing up for a project you are interested in, though, rather than just waiting for a class to be turned into a project.  If you aren’t very interested in the subject of the project, you definitely won’t enjoy it as much or be as dedicated to it!

My projects have both been classes of business majors, and the project I’m currently working on is through the Building Better Communities program, which you can read more about here.  For this project I’m currently working on, my Marketing class has prepared a market research survey for a local bank, who is interested in learning more about small business perspectives and expectations of the economy.

After our meeting with the client, our class chose a team leader and divided up into three groups that would eventually come together into one team.  For the first part of the semester, my class has been working together to develop an authentic, repeatable survey.  Each group had an essential role in the creation process.  At this point, we are in the middle of actually conducting the survey by calling local small businesses.  Once the data is collected, we will be able to analyze it and create a presentation to exhibit for our client at the end of the semester.

The first project I did was through my Management class, which was for a local non-profit organization.  After meeting with that client, we also divided our class into three teams, except each team would work on a different project for the organization.  Our goal was to provide as many benefits to our client as possible.  The first group was in charge of developing an existing fundraising program for the organization.  The second group was also involved in fundraising, only from corporate and local sponsors.  The group I was in planned a volunteer activity to be completed that semester.

We went through numerous planning stages, even going so far as to have a date set, until we realized that our timeline was much too short to coordinate all the volunteers, businesses, and materials.  Our event wasn’t going to happen on time!  So we had to backtrack and start basically from the beginning.  It was hard because we felt like failures, but as our professor assured us, it didn’t have to be a complete loss.  So what we ended up doing was gathering all the material we had prepared for the event and created a package for our client to implement the event the next semester with little to no planning on his part.

What I’ve discovered about Immersive Learning projects is that they are truly just that – learning experiences.  Sometimes you’ll do really excellent work and feel great about your finished product; other times, you may fail. But that’s when you pick yourself and your group up and do better next time.  No matter how your project goes, you will definitely have something to talk about during a job interview.  These are experiences for helping you grow as a student, as a group member, and as a leader.  And to me, that’s a pretty good reason for making Immersive Learning a BSU tagline.