Since the global lockdown, online education has taken a new frontier. People from all around the world were obliged to use online platforms to study, whether Zoom or other platforms, or maybe gain new knowledge through other education marketplaces.
Education became online and a new way has begun getting the recognition it long deserved. By using Augmented Reality or AR for short, to engage students even more, and help the teacher grasping their attention.
With AR, schools and parents don’t need to invest in a gear like Oculus Quest or anything alike. There are already 84% of teenagers (in the US) who have their own smartphone. While many schools have ‘Bring your Own Device Policy’, still it doesn’t apply to smartphones. Surely students bring their cellphones but they use them mostly for social media or to interact with their peers.
How is AR shapeshifting education ?
By operating AR on a regular smartphone the student will be more engaged in a classroom. They can superimpose a virtual world onto the physical one, and there are three main points that can help to push the utility of the technology to its limits.
- Be engaging and compelling
- Be intuitive
- Be anchored in the real world
With Augmented Reality students can also have individual content that is adapted to their own learning progression instead of having the rigid classroom of today.
With online learning tools are becoming more technologically stagnant. A webcam and audio doesn’t cut it to the chase. AR brings the solutions that every teacher has been trying to conquer, getting more interactions from their students, getting them focused and being part of the classroom. AR easily achieves all objectives.
In a journal article called Augmented Reality in the Classroom by Mark Billinghurst and Andreas Dünser showcasing that AR and education have been collaborating even before the 2000s.
The paper talks about an example where students aged 14 years old were given an AR book version of ‘Giant Jimmy Jones’ by Gavin Bishop. Virtual scenes appear over the physical pages, enhanced by audio effects including a soundtrack, and then the teacher taught the students about storytelling, narratives Graphic Design, 3D modeling and animation. Over the course of the experiment, the teachers were impressed by how the tech supported learning in a wide range of skills one teacher quotes:
“The augmented book technology proves a multi-sensory approach to learning that links text, image, sound and movement and is a highly motivational communication format”.
Skipping forward to 2016 a study by Hakan Tekedere and Hanife Göker from Gaza University in Turkey showcased a cross study of 1560 sampling from different fields and from different parts of the world showcasing that AR technologies in education are efficient and successful results have been obtained.
The benefits of integrating EdAR or Educational AR on cellular devices:
Students are still on their phones when the teacher is talking or explaining. Why not use those exact cellphones to have a positive impact and implicitly integrate it to the curriculum.
Back before online classes have started, schools still fought having a cellphone at school, since they could grasp and kind of circumvent the situation. But now students are studying from home, so what can they do about it ? The answer is turning it to your advantage.
AR courses help the students to be more engaged, it offers opportunities like never before? Like Jeff Knutson from Common Sense said “Don’t make a ban, make a plan”.
AR is revolutionizing the way we interact with information. With it we are not only passive receivers, but we interact with the information, making it an experience. AR is slowly becoming the purveyor of future generations with technology becoming even more advanced and accessible to a large majority of people.
