Multi-modal Learning for Enhanced Engagement and Presence

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The sense of smell plays a central role in how people navigate many common workplace situations. Despite this, contemporary educational approaches have only recently begun to explore using olfaction to improve education, and research on multimedia learning has almost completely overlooked it. As researchers, policy makers, and educators continue to expand digital platforms for teaching and learning, the failure to understand the role played by situational cues such as smell threatens the effectiveness of implementing STEM learning in digital environments. This integrative transdisciplinary project draws together insights from engineering, computational neurosciences, neurobiology, teaching and learning sciences, and the social sciences to advance understanding of the role that olfaction plays in learning in virtual learning environments.To investigate the role of olfaction into virtual learning environments, the project team will design software platforms that integrate control of hardware that delivers a physical olfactory stimulus into real-time 3D virtual environments. This project will advance learning and teaching technologies by: (i) developing portable hardware and software systems to reliably synthesize virtual odors through miniaturized physical apparatuses, (ii) designing principles of easy-to-use development tools for virtual odor space design, and (iii) developing cloud-powered systems to model complex odor propagation. This project aims to advance understanding of the role that explicit olfactory training plays in improving a learner’s ability to identify, localize, and describe odors. By exploring how incorporating odor affects cognitive and procedural learning and its impact on learning transfer for tasks related to olfactory identification, this research will expand understanding of multimedia learning theory. Insights from this research will be used to develop pedagogical teaching approaches for domains where olfaction is important and aligns with vocational skills. By infusing olfaction into virtual reality education spaces, this project aims to create broadly accessible education opportunities around overlooked sensory cues.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.