If Augmented Reality is Really Effective as a Teaching Tool, Why is it Not Used in Distance Education?

Abstract

In the past two decades, Augmented Reality (AR) has been increasingly receiving attention within the field of education, providing evidence of the positive impact of AR on the effectiveness of teaching and learning in several disciplinary contexts. Despite the evidence, there is a paucity of large-scale adoption of AR in higher education and no evidence of the deployment of AR in distance learning environments. The evolution of Distance Education (DE) has always been linked to advancements in (educational) technology in ameliorating the transactional distance between providing institutions and learners, supporting learners synchronously and asynchronously, as well as providing educators with tools to increase the effectiveness of pedagogy and use of resources. It is therefore unclear why AR has not been adopted in distance and distributed learning environments. A scoping review focused on establishing the enabling conditions for adopting AR in DE and the results were deductively evaluated. The results of the scoping review did not find any frameworks or models to guide the implementation of AR but pointed out several elements that need to be considered in the adoption of AR. This study resulted in a conceptual model identifying several pedagogical and organisational issues that may affect the adoption of AR in Distance Education.