The potential of extended reality in Rural Education’s future – perspectives from rural educators
Abstract
Technology-enhanced education can potentially enhance teaching and learning outcomes for rural educators since they face limited educational resources and low job satisfaction. Recently, there has been a surge in extended reality (XR) as an immersive learning technology to improve teaching and learning in rural areas, but without focusing on rural educators’ perspectives. This study aims to bridge this gap by investigating rural educators’ interactions with XR educational applications and exhibiting their insights on using XR education to improve education quality in rural areas. After educators’ hands-on experiences in a pre-designed XR education workshop, qualitative data was collected from their discussions in focus groups. As a result, educators believed that XR could transform traditional educational practices and create opportunities for new patterns of rural education (e.g., public engagement with rurality and rural vocational education). Limitations include a lack of school infrastructure to apply XR and an absence of well-structured curriculum design to use XR in the classroom setting. We suggest that future studies explore the integration of effective XR practices into primary and elementary education in those areas with limited educational resources.
Citation
Wang , X , Young , G W , Iqbal , M Z & Guckin , C M 2024 , ' The potential of extended reality in Rural Education’s future – perspectives from rural educators ' , Education and Information Technologies , vol. 29 , no. 7 , pp. 8987-9011 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12169-7
Publication
Education and Information Technologies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1360-2357Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Description
Funding: This study is funded by Trinity College Dublin-China Scholarship Council Joint Scholarship. This publication has also emanated from research conducted with the financial support of the European Union as part of the Horizon Europe Framework Program (HORIZON) under grant agreement 101070109.Collections
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