The Why's & How's

Why Augmented Reality?

Education and training were dealt a body blow in the form of the COVID 19 pandemic. We were all caught off-guard by the need for immediate virtual learning and at-home workers. Sending everyone home was a massive undertaking which left many students, teachers, parents, and work-at-home employees feeling cast adrift with not much support. When schools started to open back up, only to be shut down frequently due to COVID outbreaks, education suffered. Companies who sent their workforce home found that they had made no provisions for training new employees without actually bringing them back into the office. So they brought new hires into the office for training, only to see COVID sweep through those classes. Virtual training wasn't much better since it mainly consisted of a shared screen on a Zoom call. New employees felt ill-prepared for jobs which required them to immediately work from home after perhaps a week or two in the office or a handful of virtual meetings. Of course, the world has since opened back up, but not without a lot of people in education and training thinking that we could do a lot better. Enter the instructional designers. As we focus on what could be done better, we start with learner engagement. Virtual learning was not providing the needed level of engagement for most learners. Looking to the research of the day, we can see that our methods of education and training were mired in the past. (See the Relevant Connections section for more on that subject.) What if, we asked ourselves, training and education could be more interactive and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection? And what is it that most people have in their hands during the better part of their waking hours? Snapchat filters, TikTok videos, games using your location to enhance game play, all of these are versions of augmented reality. People are used to using augmented reality in so many ways, making the leap to using it to learn doesn't seem that much of a stretch.