No one will deny that in the world of omnipresent digital technologies and extra high intensity of changes happening in all spheres – which is today’s reality – traditional methods of learning won’t prove efficient. Everyone is talking about the necessity to make a revolution in education – but not everyone knows that the educational sphere is already being revolted. And one of the main factors making education so different from one day to another is a more and more vast usage of Augmented Reality technologies.
What makes AR attractive for Educational Purposes
With a massive turn to employing digital technologies in the education process, there is a steady demand for AR technologies created for learning. The adoption of AR technologies in education is expected to increase with the millennials (born 1981-1997) and Gen Z (born 1998-present). The potential success of using the AR tools in education is immense – and it can be easily understood why. First of all, these apps are entertaining and attention-catching. Second, they are interactive. These features help achieve aims in the learning process professors have been dreaming about: engage and motivate students to study the material from different angles; help teach subjects where students can’t get a first-hand experience (like in astronomy and geography); foster creativity as an approach to gaining knowledge. There are four main groups of AR tools developed for education purposes: · AR books. We already have generations which have been growing with a smartphone in hand and a digital reality around. Reading is not a popular hobby anymore: according to the official statistics, only 38% of 4th graders and 19% of 8th graders report reading on their own time.[i] In this situation, AR books seem to be an effective tool to bridge this gap: they are entertaining enough to tackle children short attention span and enhance interaction with them, for example, with 3D characters springing to life on a book’s page when someone is reading it or providing extra content when a reader is revising pages through mobile devices that support AR features, whether these are wearable gadgets or smartphones and tablets empowered with special apps. Plus AR books can probably tackle another challenge: demand for creativity. The 2017 World Economic Forum report lists creativity among top 3 skills needed for successful workers.[ii] If smartphone or iPad application development industry turns to providing students with these interactive technologies, AR books can become a key to skill development since primary school. · AR gaming. For decades professors have been using different games in order to make a studying process for students more interactive and descriptive. AR technologies give vast opportunities for this. In this case reality becomes a 3D setting filled with objects and creatures thus creating a situation in which it is getting easier to study a historical event or a certain historical period. Like this, they prove the efficiency of discovery-based learning. The principle lying in the basis of this type of applications and making them so efficient is simple: we get the information much better and keep it in memory much longer when the information has been discovered by ourselves. More and more museums around the world are launching these applications to make a visit to them more educative. Some apps use broader locations; thus, CultureClic provides tourists coming to France with broad information on 1300 museums, as well as information about cultural events taking place nearby.[iii] · Objects modeling. The apps of this type introduce manual elements into the education process, which always has a positive effect upon learning results. Not just watching a 3D model, but rotating it, discovering from different angles and interacting with it in many ways augments the received experience and gives a more clear idea of the object of study. · Skills training. Having a possibility to provide a contextual, in situ learning process, AR education apps possess the power of making studying a ubiquitous process indeed. Their employment has already become extremely valuable in medicine studies, where students can practise in a context which is as close to real-life conditions as possible, but at the same time with safeguarding the patient. AR in Education: Spreading Its Influence A potential growth of AR technologies usage in the classroom was recognized long ago. The independent institution called the New Media Consortium (NMC) Emerging Technologies Initiative's Horizon Project, which studies trends, challenges and technology developments likely to have an impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry, has been talking about the widespread usage of AR tools in education to happen since 2010.[v] Despite the perspectives standing behind the application of the AR technology in the education and learning processes, it is hard to say that it is the educational sphere motivation which inspires developers. An absolute majority of AR apps have initially no educational agenda and have been created for other spheres which are considered to be more profitable: advertising and marketing; architecture and construction; entertainment; medical procedures; travelling business. But educators have learnt how to put in use these advancements for improving learning processes in collaboration with software development companies. For example, the partnership between the Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft’s HoloLens has given the students a possibility to study a three-dimensional representation of a body. [vi] Another bright project was launched in collaboration between Fraunhofer IDM@NTU and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (NTU) and aims at bringing the study of anatomy to the next level by using AR app on the mobile devices.[vii] With the current demand for AR effective solutions in the educating sphere and with the recent reports in which expectations from the AR/VR market come to $108 billion by 2021 - with AR taking the lion’s share of $83 billion and VR $25 billion[viii] - there is little doubt that AR education products will make a serious part of the pie.
Conclusion
AR technologies are needed in education nowadays, to keep the learning process fast-paced and compatible with the reality. Different types of Augmented Reality apps have appeared on the market in response to a high demand for new learning technics. The demand will be only on the rise – each new generation can be called more used to digital technologies than previous ones, and its representatives require a totally different approach to studying than we had several years ago. Recent reports state that AR tools will be generating more and more profits, and the predictions for education solutions to win a considerable percentage of them are extremely positive.
[1]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ [2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ [3]http://www.cultureclic.fr/ [4]https://hbr.org/2017/03/augmented-reality-is-already-improving-worker-performance [5]https://www.nmc.org/sites/default/files/pubs/1316815357/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf [6]https://www.imedicalapps.com/2016/06/case-western-cleveland-clinic-augmented-reality-medical-education/ [7]https://www.igd.fraunhofer.de/en/projects/ar-learning-tools-anatomical-education [8]https://www.digi-capital.com/news/2017/01/after-mixed-year-mobile-ar-to-drive-108-billion-vrar-market-by-2021/#.WjPY3VVl-M9
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