Research priorities in immersive learning technology: the perspectives of the iLRN community

Abstract

This paper presents the perspectives of the Immersive Learning Research Network community on the relevance of various challenges to the adoption of immersive learning technology, along three dimensions: access, content production, and deployment. Using a previously-validated questionnaire, we surveyed this community of 622 researchers and practitioners during the Summer of 2018, attaining 54 responses. By ranking the challenges individually and within each dimension, the results point towards higher relevance being placed on aspects that link immersive environments with learning management systems and pedagogical tasks, alongside aspects that empower non-technical users (educational actors) to produce interactive stories, objects, and characters.

Towards an Immersive Learning Knowledge Tree - a Conceptual Framework for Mapping Knowledge and Tools in the Field

“…This process provided important recommendations on the structural, context clarification, ambiguity, and missing aspects of the questionnaire. We then deployed it with the researchers involved with events organized by the Immersive Learning Research network, resulting in a ranking of these research priorities [24].…”

“…In parallel, we applied the technological research priorities questionnaire, by surveying the immersive learning research Network (iLRN) community of researchers on their priorities for technology research. Defining this community as researchers involved with iLRN-organized events (committee members, organizers, keynote speaker, and authors), the results ranked and clustered 43 priorities, with the topmost being "Creating/identifying solutions for teachers/trainers to be able to identify learning support needs and provide extra resources directly within immersive environments" [24].…”

A Novel Tool for Immersive Authoring of Experiential Learning in Virtual Reality

“…However, the creation of VR training experiences is not widespread, requiring expensive and time-consuming development processes (e.g. using Unity [8] or Unreal Engine [9]) involving software development experts [10]. To mitigate this, authoring tools have been proposed for the development of VR applications for training and certification (e.g.…”

Immersive Authoring of Virtual Reality Training

“…However, the creation of training experiences in VR is limited, due to its expensive and time-consuming development process (e.g. Unity or Unreal Engine) that requires software development experts [11]. To mitigate this hurdle, authoring tools have been proposed for development of VR applications for training and certification (e.g.…”