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Over the last several months, many K-12 schools have adopted VR/AR ed-tech tools for hands-on science courses, activities, and skill development, among other growing uses. According to Johann Wentzel, a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario whose research focuses on augmented and virtual reality, the field has come a long way in less than a decade. He said advancements in AR/VR technology could work together to better enable "a sense of presence, immersion, and interactivity" that may characterize the education metaverse in the years ahead.
According to a recent Brookings Institution report, the AR/VR-driven metaverse could be "as omnipresent as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook [now Meta]" as the tech field progresses, and as educators embrace gamification in K-12 learning. They also envision the technology to create realistic and immersive learning experiences similar to the children's TV series "The Magic School Bus" in which the show's students take field trips into the human body or far away in outer space. This type of learning would work well with children's tendencies to learn by recognizing patterns, social interaction, and iteration. They also added that human brains have a couple of very fundamental characteristics, they work by being active and engaged.
However, the widespread use of AR/VR technology in K-12 courses could be years down the line, with one of the main barriers being content development. Citing the Brookings report, she said one of the main things holding the field back is a lack of collaboration between ed-tech developers and education and child-psychology experts. They also focused on the need for more cost-effective AR/VR tools, adding that the tech remains largely inaccessible for underserved students in schools with limited funding. Educators and designers have a really unique opportunity to take advantage of spatial technologies like AR and VR to provide more impactful and educational experiences.
The Metaverse Platform can offer an interactive experience that is impossible in a real-life situation. It can be used as a medium for education and training programs, thus reducing the number of injuries and accidents.
In the case of these studies, virtual worlds eliminated the boundaries of a room and provided a multi-faceted user-content environment that allowed full immersion into a realistic scenario.
XR in Education
XR in Education
A recent study by PwC (2020) on training and education in VR concluded that VR is an effective way to not only teach job skills but also soft skills such as leadership, resilience, and change management. The study concluded that VR participants were able to learn four times faster, with 3.5 times higher emotional connection while being 2.5 times more confident and four times more focused.
Education is one of the biggest beneficiaries of XR, where both AR and VR show their unique strength. While AR is able to give a contextual overlay as a learning aid, the unique strength of VR is the ability to spread out complex information in a space not limited by monitor size. The ability to use an entire 360-degree stereoscopic environment to organize, present, and manage learning content, plus the shielded focus, makes it an almost ideal candidate for efficiency and cost-effectiveness at scale.
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