Augmented Reality is a relatively new field in terms of the design of learning environments. For much of 2017 and early 2018, teachers and curriculum designers interested in exploring this field were dependent on engaging digital content creators and software developers in designing such learning experiences for students.

In 2018, our team critically questioned this default paradigm. We conceptualised a study which sought to help course instructors at college-level chemistry explore and understand the affordances of Augmented Reality in the learning of science, specifically in chemistry.

The result was a collaboration between our team and the National Pingtung University in Taiwan. Through this collaboration, a study was enacted among undergraduates for the July – December semester in 2018.

The purpose of the pilot was to help teachers and course instructors have a clearer understanding of how novices in chemistry approach and seek to make sense of key concepts in these disciplines, such as the structure of organic molecular chains.

This pedagogical approach – which we have dubbed Learner-Generated Augmentation – is distinct from the majority of learning interventions using Augmented Reality to date. Specifically, the majority of learning interventions with Augmented Reality are designed from the perspective of using the technology to exemplify the concepts to be learned – such as the structure of organic molecular chains in chemistry.

For this project, the curriculum design paradigm is from the diametrically opposed perspective of tasking the learners (and not the domain experts) to depict such conceptual representations, using the augmentations afforded by Augmented Reality. In other words, instead of using Augmented Reality to help learners visualize the concepts, the technology is used to afford them the ability to sketch and represent their naïve and evolving conceptions for themselves.

This is consistent with the approach of Disciplinary Intuitions, and the Six Learnings framework.

In this way, their conceptions and intuitions about the respective topics are made more visible to their teachers and their peers, thereby making collaborative dialogue around their misconceptions more meaningful.

Our pioneering work in Learner-Generated Augmentation is described in a paper published in Vol 11 No 3 of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.