Extended Reality (XR) Opportunities and Challenges for eLearning Practitioners: A conversation with Immersive Learning Research Network's Dr. Jonathon Richter

Learning scientist Dr. Jonathon Richter stands at the forefront of cutting-edge research and technological innovation in extended reality (XR).  As a faculty fellow in the Vice Provost’s Office of Educational Initiatives and Innovation at the University of Montana and CEO of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), an international non-profit 501(c) 3, Dr. Richter leads a global community of researchers, e-Learning specialists, computer scientists, academics and others. His work focuses on the cutting edge of research and learning experience design with virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies. (The interview has been edited for brevity and style.)

What is iLRN?

iLRN is a professional association, a network of computer scientists, game designers, and others in these applied areas of virtual reality, augmented reality, haptics, and mixed reality, we call this XR, extended reality. It’s applying all of those types of technologies, where you feel immersed either in a virtual world, or you're using an overlay of technology on top of the real world, and various ways that you become immersed psychologically, like immersing in a novel, but it's a wide range of technologies that create that psychological focus. And it is aligning that to learning, so learning outcomes, where you're either training, doing formal education, informal education, or any kinds of applied ways where the learning is happening in a measured or meaningful way. I want iLEARN to be one of those places where we can see how we can create a better world using immersive technologies and amplify the science of it and the application of immersive technologies to real problems.

What's the story about how you got involved with XR? You seem pretty passionate about it.

My dad owned a drug store in Montana, and we had the early Pong and Atari, so I had access to a lot of video games as a kid back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was always a real interest of mine with this stuff in active worlds.

How would you define extended reality in terms of e-learning?

I would define extended reality as sort of all of the different ways that digital technologies can provide sensory input into the various senses that are built into our biological systems and give you the impression that you start projecting yourself into it in a variety of ways. You become immersed in paying attention, and it is motivating you, or it engages you.  All of a sudden, you feel like you're in another place, or it's helping you accent the sense of place that you're already in. So you can look through the magic glass of your cell phone or put on a pair of glasses with a digital overlay of the world around you. That's augmented reality, So the heads-up display on airplanes, or heads-up displays on race cars can have a whole variety of different impacts on learning. The first time somebody lands a space shuttle in real life is the first time they haven't done it in a simulation!

Do you find that these technologies encourage student engagement and achieving learning outcomes?

Oh, absolutely. My focus for all these years since starting at Montana State University-Northern is technology adoption, how and why people adopt technologies, and how they are used generally for impact. So the quick answer is, yes, people are attracted to shiny things. They like new toys. They like to try new things, and the novelty of trying these things is a good hook. But that doesn't keep people, and it doesn't necessarily mean they're learning anything meaningful. It just creates that engagement.  

What challenges must e-Learning designers, instructional designers, and educators confront when creating learning ecosystems with extended reality?

Attention is a really big deal to learning, because if you're not paying attention, then you can't engage.  And if you're not engaging, you're not going to learn. Learning comes down to engaging with the material. In this fast-paced, interconnected world with everyone moving so fast and with many devices competing with our attention, we all exhibit aspects of what I would call learning disabilities because of this insane attentional ecosystem that we're swimming in, but if you're not paying attention, you don't engage, and then you don't learn. I think if you design these environments with instructional design best practices coupled with the latest learning sciences research on how people best learn something—if you really focus these tools to get people's attention and hold their attention and get them engaged_—you can get them to the goal post, which is, did they learn something or achieve something. Whatever the learning objective is then, absolutely XR can get you there.

Do you have conversations with people about how you measure the effectiveness of using some of these tools like, how do we know it works?

Assessment is a big deal. Take standardized tests, for example. A lot of them really only look at discrete kinds of knowledge. They don't look at more difficult, complex, creative types of knowledge. Whereas if you're recording somebody in an immersive environment, you have too much data, and you're swimming through it, trying to figure out how to connect it, to prove what it was you were looking for. So when you're looking at transfer to the real world, a lot of people want to say, well, you're going into this virtual reality. What good is it to the physical or the real world, the world outside of the virtual reality? From the research that has been done by Harvard’s Chris Dede and others, what we do know about these immersive learning environments is that transfer to the real world, if you do it right, is more powerful than any other type of teaching medium.

What skills do you think educators and trainers need to effectively use extended reality, XR, for immersive teaching and learning and training? You know, create these spaces that are essentially tech for good. What skills do educators need to use effectively to make this happen?

I think some of the basic concepts for what is immersive learning and what are the hallmarks of it are really essential. There's the idea of situated understanding. For example, if you have a particular subject matter with the sciences or history, or whatever it is that you're teaching or training, think about all of the different kinds of situations that are important to your discipline or to your subject area for your learners to effectively understand history.  You can put the learners in a situation where they would understand things better by seeing the situation. Take something like a war, which is a complex set of dynamics all happening at once, or if you're working on a car or an engine of a jet airplane, just the schematic might not do it. You’ve got to get under the engine and see the squeezed part you’re trying to get in there. That situation is a 360-degree ecological setup. So if somebody says you have to be there in order to understand it, that's situated understanding. Mathematics can be just straight mathematics that you're doing, using the numbers, but those symbols can be challenging to think about when you take the math and situate it across a variety of different contexts that can assist you to understand things.

People naturally see and understand the world around them as an ecosystem. When you reach out and touch something it has a consequence, or it'll move, or it'll change, or it'll fall, and so on. So, when things surround you in the digital immersive space, there’s also this sense of agency. The learner interacts with the digital immersive space and figures out that interaction and what impact can be made on that space.  Agency says, when I pick up a book and drop it, it makes a noise, or it falls to the ground. But the things that I do in an immersive space make a difference; I can change the world through my actions, and inputting those into 360 environments is really important. So agency and situated understanding are the things that I would think of, and by doing that you're not starting with the technology and using it in a gimmicky way. You're attaching it to the learning objectives and thinking about how would benefit the learners, and what sorts of immersive experiences could help enhance my students' understanding. On top of this is a disposition of exploring, and it really helps to match up the objectives with the technology for your particular learner audience So a community of practice that can help you manage that complexity and is really useful.

What is the future of immersive technology in e-learning? How do you see it evolving over the next few years?

I think the future is increasingly complex. It's just moving really fast all the time, and it requires a mindset of innovation. It's increasingly interconnected. Systems theory in instructional design teaches us everything’s connected. And in the technological sense, society is being impacted by technology in the way it permeates almost everything: economics, international trade, interpersonal communications, and communities. Those are good dynamics to think about the increasing interconnection and fast-paced nature of our world and complexity. So those are all broad megatrends that I see happening. And immersive spaces are useful in helping us get a hold of that, to visualize, to collaborate, and to understand that complexity, the invisible connections between things. So we can really use immersive spaces to help understand the complexity. And of course, there’s artificial intelligence (AI) being used more and more, and it has been said that AI and immersive environments are considered kind of siblings. Kent Bye pointed that out in 2021 in one of his keynotes, and I think that is a great way of thinking about it.

So the future of immersive learning is we've been saying that it's about to become mainstream, it always seems like it's about to burst forth. We've had a variety of moments, I think, in the last 15 years that feels like it's about to do that, so I think most of us are a little shy of that now, like man, it looks like it, but maybe not. But the ecosystem is there. You have the designers, the developers you have the smaller companies and the bigger companies that are all investing in these things. And so it does look like within the next year or two, maybe three, you're just going to see increased adoption and incredible things in gaming, but immersive learning in particular applied in the workplace, medicine, K-12, and higher education, too. 

Dr. Richter and company are busy planning the 11^th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network to be held in Chicago; this year’s theme is “Reading the World: Immersive Learning & Multimodal Literacies.

About the Author

Doug Wilson, Ph.D., serves as Assistant Professor, Learning Technologies at George Mason University where he provides instruction to graduate students in the Learning, Design, and Technology (LDT) Program. Before joining George Mason, Dr. Wilson taught graduate-level instructional design and educational technology courses online in the Higher Education and Learning Technologies program at Texas A&M University, Commerce. At Southern Methodist University,  Dr. Wilson served as an instructional designer in the Center for Teaching Excellence and led collaborations with faculty on the design of the online M.S. in cybersecurity at Lyle School of Engineering. His teaching experience also includes more than 10 years of service as a professor of journalism and basic writing at Richland College. Dr. Wilson’s credentials include a PH.D. in learning, design, and technology from The Pennsylvania State University, a master of science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a bachelor of science in microbiology from Xavier University of Louisiana. Dr. Wilson’s current research interests include augmented and virtual reality, learning experience design, instructional design, and online teaching and learning. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals and conference proceedings. Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Wilson worked for more than a decade as a major market television news reporter.