Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College (MGCCC) is on the brink of partnering with EON Reality, Inc. to deliver XR technology to MGCCC students and business/industry partners. Therefore, an overview of the current status of XR seemed in order.
“Extended reality (XR) is a comprehensive term for the environments that either blend the physical with the virtual or provide fully immersive virtual experiences. The two most common technologies are augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Whereas AR overlays physical objects and places with virtual content, VR is typically a more immersive experience, involving manipulations of and interactions with virtual objects within an entirely virtual environment. Most commonly the immersive experiences are delivered by means of a headset, but AR often requires only a smartphone. Another kind of XR is holography, by which an object is imaged as a three-dimensional representation instead of a two-dimensional image. As a corollary, 3D printing, as the name suggests, reproduces physical objects in three dimensions using a variety of techniques and materials. Higher education is experimenting actively with XR technologies in the curriculum, and despite current hurdles (such as the cost of equipment and the effort it can take to create content), the potential for XR as a learning vehicle is high.
XR unquestionably has relevance for teaching and learning. The real question is about the breadth and depth of that relevance. Judging from EDUCAUSE research and the exemplar projects collected for the Horizon Report, XR does show great potential for learning, provided its use is embedded in holistic instructional and learning designs.
Over the past three years, EDUCAUSE research has found that XR can be effectively deployed to support skills-based and competency pedagogies; that it can expand the range of hands-on learning experience; and that it can “enable high- touch, high-cost learning experiences to be scaled up.” In addition, the exemplar projects reveal that, like OER, XR can offer learners the rich learning experience of co-creating course content. At California State University, San Bernardino, for example, the Immersive Media & Learning Lab enables students to create XR content in partnership with faculty.
There are challenges, of course. EDUCAUSE research notes that the effective deployment of XR faces the twin challenges of requiring time and skills. The use of XR must also “fit into instructors’ existing practices, and the cost cannot be significantly higher than that of the alternatives already in use.”
A thread that is emerging from early research and experimentation is that XR most strongly benefits learning when closely paired with non-XR learning engagements. One study, involving the use of VR for a writing course, found that students who used both VR and a textbook achieved ‘significantly greater writing complexity’ than students who used either VR alone or the textbook alone. HoloAnatomy (Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic) was created in anticipation of a new medical school building for the CWRU School of Medicine, a building with no cadaver labs. Initial testing of HoloAnatomy has shown that using this XR environment is at least as effective in achieving desired learning outcomes as traditional cadaveric dissection. Despite this initial success, CWRU has retained some cadaveric dissection, finding value for medical students in, as a representative of CWRU said, the ‘exposure to and demystification of death, viewing anatomical variance and the rite of passage associated with dissection of the human body.’
Looking ahead, it is clear that equipment costs will decrease while XR capabilities increase. Combined with major advances in wireless and cellular network performance, such as Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and 5G, it seems very likely that XR experiences will become more immersive and more powerful over time and that, given the improvements in network capacities, it will be possible to deliver those experiences to both residential and remote learners.”
Source: NMC Horizon Report: 2020 Higher Education Edition
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