Case Study: University of Arizona expands equitable, student-centered virtual field trips with ThingLink

University of Arizona creates 5- to 10-tag virtual field trips with ThingLink

The University of Arizona's College of Education, led by Dr. Christopher Sanderson, faced challenges related to geographic and socioeconomic barriers that limited student access to experiences, as well as a pedagogical need to move beyond generic, one-off technology use in teacher preparation. They turned to the vendor ThingLink to address these issues with its virtual field trip platform.

The solution implemented was having pre-service teachers use ThingLink to create their own original, contextually relevant virtual field trips. This required students to source images and embed multimedia tags, fostering deeper subject knowledge through creation. ThingLink enabled the university to break down access barriers for rural learners and resulted in student teachers demonstrating greater comprehension. Dr. Sanderson plans to extend the use of ThingLink into creating 3D and AR experiences.

University of Arizona