Using VR Headsets for a Public Health Course

We are currently supporting Professor Angie Denisse Otiniano Verissimo’s course, Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) & Health Equity: Applying the Promotor Model for Social Justice, offered through UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health with the support from the Teaching Learning Center’s Sandbox grant. First introduced in Fall 2025, the course centers on community-engaged learning by pairing students with local health organizations across Los Angeles. As part of this collaboration, students contribute to projects such as data analysis, survey development, and literature reviews while engaging directly with community health workers and their lived experiences. In partnership with our studio, the course integrates virtual reality (VR) as a method for translating these field experiences into immersive training modules for healthcare workers using the platform: FrameVR .

This collaboration highlights a replicable model for faculty interested in incorporating VR headsets into their curriculum. Rather than positioning VR as a passive tool, students use it to co-create simulations grounded in community-informed practices, drawing from site visits and direct engagement with frontline public health work. These immersive outputs extend the impact of community-based research by capturing culturally responsive approaches in a format that can be revisited and scaled for training and education. More broadly, the course demonstrates how integrating immersive technology within a community-engaged framework allows students to apply classroom knowledge in real-world contexts while contributing meaningful value to partner organizations. To read more, please reference TLC’s write-up here.

Using VR Headsets for a Public Health Course

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