Raphael ThysFirstly, I’d like to thank everyone who read my first blog, and I would recommend that anyone who hasn’t read it to check it out as this blog will expand on the ideas discussed in my previous blog. In the previous blog, I presented 4 main ideas for how I believe that Augmented Reality can redefine the future of education:
1. The ability to simulate a classroom environment during fully online education.
2. The ability to simulate interaction between classmates during fully online education.
3. Access to real time, interactive education remotely to distant and hard to reach locations.
4. The ability to learn much more complex and difficult concepts at an earlier age, which would traditionally not be possible due to the limitations of a classroom.
I believe that all of these ideas have immense potential to redefine online education. While all 4 are important, I do believe that the first two points represent the strongest areas where AR can succeed over traditional online teaching methods.
Simulating a Complete Classroom Environment Online
As everyone who has lived through the COVID-19 Pandemic as a student (or even a teacher) can attest, online education is a completely different experience than the classrooms we were used to. Students lost the ability to easily interact with their fellow classmates during their school hours, and teachers were unable to see their students responses to their lessons in real time. Many professors expressed their difficulties with lecturing to a screen, as they relied on seeing the reactions of students to gauge if the students were understanding what they were being taught. This does not only affect the teachers, as students would have been able to immediately get help from their teachers or fellow classmates if they were confused about something in their lecture. Many times I found that I had to reach out to a professor after class time for a clarification about a point or concept they covered in class, which often took a while to get and took time out of both of our leisure time to solve.
Another major issue has been the loss of interaction between students and their classmates during their time in online school. For younger students especially, this was often the main source of time with their friends, and losing this kept students more isolated from one another. This lack of support from friends lead to widespread decline in mental health, as well as a lack of educational support, as many students relied on classmates to help them understand different concepts in class. I myself have suffered a serious decline in my mental health, which began when classes were moved from classrooms to computer screens. Isolation can be a serious issue when you spend most of you days at home, stuck to a computer screen in lectures and labs.
I believe that using AR, we can redesign online education with the problems in mind, and create and environment where we can teach effectively online, while still keeping the peer to peer interaction that is present in classrooms. Augmented reality can be used to create a virtual environment for all students to share, that the educator can build into a classroom tailored to their needs. With little more than a pair of AR glasses and a camera, students can be transported into this virtual classroom alongside their classmates. Their cameras will transmit their images to the AR environment, which will use them to populate the virtual classroom with real, live students who can interact in real time. The teachers will be able to see the students they are teaching and will see the confusion on their faces when they need help or the understanding when they finally grasp a difficult concept. Students will be able to turn to their best friend sitting next to them and crack a joke and see their friends laugh. During break times, students will be able to hang out and talk like they used to every day during in person classes. All of the missing pieces that students and teachers lost when classes were forced online can be filled by this AR based virtual environment, without compromising their education.
If this technology were available when COVID-19 shut down schools worldwide, I believe that students would not have lost so much of their lives for the past 3 years. As I can personally attest, many students struggled with their education, their friendships, and their mental health during this time, which could all be prevented from happening again if school should be forced to close again due to some unforeseen event. The technology exists, it just has to be applied in the right ways and it can lead to a complete transformation of the education system.
Demonstration of a Day in an Augmented Reality School.
I have prepared a video where I demonstrate how I have envisioned a day in class would look in an Augmented Reality classroom environment. It is hard to visualize this experience, as nothing like it currently exists, so it is more of a description of a lesson plan and how the experience would feel for students.
Future Ideas
There are many other ways I believe that AR could be introduced into classrooms beyond the virtual classroom idea that I have focused on the majority of this post. My first idea is one I touched on briefly in my demonstration video, which is bringing hands-on, technical classes into online schooling and to a younger age group than previously possible. To clarify, when high schools were forced to move online, many students who were interested in classes like woodworking and auto repair were unable to take these classes as the were impossible to bring online effectively. This took away from the overall quality of education for many students, and did not allow some to pursue areas they were passionate about. AR technology is already used in similar ways in some institutions, but it could be introduced to high schools as a way to improve their ability to teach these technical classes. Not only could they be taught online using AR, but in person classes could be supplemented with AR as a way to improve the depth of their studies. In an auto repair class, students could use AR to work on 1000s of different models of cars that they would not have access to normally due to the costs. For metalworking, students could work on much larger projects than they would be able to do in the limited space of a classroom. It could also be used to allow younger students, in middle school for example, to take these classes that previously would have been deemed to dangerous for their age group, as AR removes the risks of physically performing these tasks.
Final Thoughts
Thank you for reading about my ideas for AR technology and online education. I hope my ideas made sense, as I truly do believe that AR is one of the only ways that online education can truly be as successful as traditional classroom education has been for centuries. As the world continues to transition to a more online focused society, educators will try to push more and more towards online education, as it is easier, cheaper, and more accessible for students. If they are not able to address the drawbacks of online education, this will result in many negative side effects for students. Augmented Reality can be a way to accommodate both sides of this issue, where educators can teach online without the major drawbacks that we have seen in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This topic is very interesting to me as I have felt many of the effects personally and I believe that if AR had been used in this way I have detailed, the experience would have been much more positive for students in general.
Please stay tuned for future blogs on this topic and I have many other ideas for how this technology could be used and introduced into classrooms.
Thank you,
Evan