Roundup on Research: Extended Reality as an Online Teaching Tool
Using XR technology can engage and excite learners, but accessibility and effectiveness must be considered
How this will help
While teaching online courses, we sometimes encounter moments when we wish we could bring students together into the same environment.
Perhaps it’s to explore the biology of a local riverbed or examine the unique architecture of a distant city. Or maybe we want to host a shared experience for our class, where we all see the same object in our own space, having the opportunity to move around it and view it in close detail. In some instances, the subject matter of our course might simply be too risky or impractical for students to try, such as learning to fly, traveling back in time to visit ancient Rome, or viewing the inside of an organ.
Each of these cases is a prime opportunity for the use of extended reality (XR) technology to offer rich online learning activities to overcome these obstacles. Composed of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, XR technologies can enhance your online teaching by enabling shared access to these otherwise impossible or infeasible learning activities. Research supports the value of incorporating XR experiences in higher education, while also identifying what we still can learn about these developing technologies.
Balancing Immersion with Access
To better understand the effectiveness of XR in postsecondary learning environments, researchers at the Center for Academic Innovation set out to identify the current state of the science, as well as what remains unanswered when considering these new tools for teaching and learning.
Our study, “Surveying the (Virtual) Landscape: A Scoping Review of XR in Postsecondary Learning Environments,” examined all available research on the topic to find out if and how XR enhances learning, for whom, and in what contexts.
As you might expect, the findings were complex. First, they found those previous use cases – teaching in risky, impossible, or impractical situations – to be the opportunities where XR was widely considered to be most useful.
As for efficacy, the science is just too new to be able to say for sure whether XR technology has a direct effect on learning. But what was clear is that these tools greatly enhance most students’ enjoyment of learning, their motivation, their curiosity, and their sense of being deeply engaged in the learning process.
While there isn’t enough robust, generalizable research yet to say XR directly improves learning outcomes, each of these important emotional factors, such as enjoyment of learning, has an indirect impact on learning that shouldn’t be discounted. There is clear value in building joy, motivation, engagement, and presence into the learning activities we craft for our online courses, and research supports XR as a way to do so for many students.
While XR has value, not all students can access or enjoy XR activities. The scoping review found this to be an area where further research is needed to fully understand the important accessibility implications of using XR in an online course. In fact, less than 10% of the studies included in the review addressed accessibility for diverse students.
Accessibility in XR
Accessibility refers not only to technical access (such as device compatibility or internet bandwidth), but also to inclusive design that considers the needs of students with disabilities, neurodivergent learners, and others who may be marginalized by standard XR experiences.
This emphasizes that as research in this new area moves forward, we need to better grapple with who might be excluded from the benefits of XR, such as those with visual impairments, certain health conditions, or those with limited internet bandwidth or technology resources.
Is XR the Right Fit?
We also found that most studies of XR in college teaching currently adopt a technology-driven approach, making studies of learning-driven XR implementation another priority.
In a technology-driven approach, an instructor might ask, for example, “How can I use XR to teach nursing students about the lungs?” Whereas a learning-driven approach would start from a question like, “What is the best way to teach nursing students about the lungs,” and perhaps identify XR as a potentially successful strategy to meet that goal.
The predominance of a technology-driven approach is certainly logical given the young age of this area of scholarship and the novel technology it studies. But as the field matures, learning-driven approaches to XR adoption and research will become ever more important for advancing the effectiveness of XR in online learning environments.
Learning-driven educational technology implementation has been demonstrated as most effective from a learning-outcomes standpoint (Logeswaran et al., 2020), so adopting this approach also presents an opportunity to address the gap in empirical research to demonstrate XR’s effectiveness as a learning tool.
As you think about ways to incorporate new techniques into your online teaching, how might XR technologies be useful? This research suggests a few key priorities:
- Bringing to life objects or environments that would be dangerous, expensive, impossible, or impractical to add to the online learning environment otherwise.
- Starting from a learning-driven approach. Ask yourself first how to best teach something, considering XR among the set of possible approaches. Then, where it makes the most sense, move forward with XR activities.
- Consider XR in situations where enjoyment, embodiment, motivation, interest, and excitement are valuable outcomes.
- In all cases, keep in mind the still-developing understanding of XR’s limitations regarding accessibility for diverse learners. Alternative activities for those with limited bandwidth, different device access, visual impairments, vertigo, or other challenges with movement should always be provided.
As we continue to learn more about the opportunities XR can present for online teaching, the technology will also continue to evolve. There is a clear role for these activities to enhance learning, and for us to continue studying important questions of for whom, when, and in what settings.
References
Cradit, N. W., Aguinaga, J., & Hayward, C. (2024). Surveying the (Virtual) Landscape: A scoping review of XR in postsecondary learning environments. Education and Information Technologies, 29(7), 8057–8077.
Logeswaran, A., Munsch, C., Chong, Y. J., Ralph, N., & Mccrossnan, J. (2021). The role of extended reality technology in healthcare education: Towards a learner-centred approach. Future Healthcare Journal, 8(1).
