The iPEAR project combines collaborative expertise of technology-enhanced learning researchers, computer scientists, and educators to build a strategic partnership to streamline the adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) technology in educational practice. The project will create innovative open educational resources for educators that help implement and integrate active and collaborative learning pedagogical approaches supported by AR. This will enrich the teaching practice and support inclusive, peer to peer learning relevant to the requirements and preferences of the students. The iPEAR project is an extension of two ERASMUS+ projects ViLi and AR-FOR-EU. The ViLi (https://www.viliproject.eu/) aims to improve the visual literacies of educators, making learning more visual through static, dynamic, and interactive visuals. The AR-FOR-EU project (https://codereality.net/) aims to train AR-development skills of software developers and media designers. The iPEAR project further develops visual representations in learning and participatory learning approaches. The main objectives are to: 1. Map the educational use of AR, focusing on collaborative and peer learning approaches The consortium will map the existing research results and available applications, supplementing these results and validating them in case studies following the research methodology of Informed Grounded Theory. The focus on peer learning and collaborative learning approach is within the inclusive education framework, as defined by the United Nations – taking into account personal requirements and preferences. In 2016, the United Nations released General Comment No. 4 to explain the right to inclusive education, focusing the new definition on providing all students with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment that best corresponds to their requirements and preferences. 2. Facilitate the adoption of AR in education by creating open access teaching and learning material for educators. The new materials will include a toolkit of educational AR apps and platforms supplemented by teacher guidelines, a compendium of best practices, and a competence framework for AR educators all available as independently as OERs and delivered as a MOOC with professionally designed audiovisual material) 3. Create and maintain a community of experts in educational AR and other stakeholders that will ensure sustainability of the project and keep the most useful results up-to-date The design of the project is guided by the European policies, strategies and tools. The project aims to improve the digital competence of educators and subsequently their students by developing a comprehensive set of educational resources that are open and accessible online worldwide (EU initiative “Opening Up Education”). The project supports the “Digital Learning & ICT in Education” 2018 and “Digital Education Action Plan” 2018 by promoting innovative technology-enhanced learning practices with both the content of the materials and by making all materials designed for and available online as OERs and as a MOOC. The project supports the European skills frameworks: “Digital skills framework” and the “Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu), by extending them into a framework for specific skills educators need to integrate AR in their teaching. The project supports the ”EU Cohesion Policy”, focusing on social inclusion according to students requirements and preferences based on the UN definition of inclusion. The project plans to communicate and disseminate the results via a range of online activities, reaching the major stakeholders, educational organisations and individual educators. These activities will culminate in a final project conference on the topic of educational AR planned for 100 participants, targeting educators, practitioners, researchers, and students. The outreach and impact of the project will be extended via a massive online open course for educators, delivering all project results structured in a course format. We will strengthen the skills of educators in higher education and other educational settings by designing new content within the case studies, linking visual approaches to peer to peer learning to facilitate more socially inclusive education. As the dropout rates in the universities are increasing and students become more and more mobile internationally, digital skills and inclusive teaching methods are key competences in Higher Education and global migration. Long-term benefits include enhancing the digital competence of educators, stimulating further use of visuals in education, enhancing competitiveness and modernisation of HE, promoting education for all.
Our assumption was that the reasons for the slow adoption of AR in HE were not only lying in the technology itself, but in the insufficient support of educators. The iPEAR project wanted to offer support by developing pedagogical guidance based on an inclusive peer learning approach. Peer learning was and still is one of the most effective pedagogies to make learners more active and engaged in the learning process. Educational research always highlighted the importance of active, interactive and inclusive learning. However, this was often ignored in education, among other reasons due to both a lack of understanding and missing adoption guidelines. The iPEAR project offers such guidelines. Furthermore, iPEAR wanted to ensure the sustainability of the project’s results by creating and maintaining a community of experts in educational AR and other stakeholders.
Although AR is a rapidly growing market and many use cases in gaming, manufacturing et al can be found, the adoption of the technology in education was still fragmented when the project started. The flagship European educational AR research projects and European AR companies had their focus on solutions for workplace training in high-tech and highly automated industries and were not targeted at Higher Education. At the same time, reviews of AR applications in educational contexts reported that the use of this technology had a positive impact on engagement and learning performance. Moreover, when we applied for the project, the latest smartphone models were already equipped with AR-enabling hardware, while the AR software industry was growing in the offer of platforms for designing content and self-standing applications. Nevertheless, in 2020, the adoption rates were low. The world of immersive technologies was an unexplored territory for educators and their students especially in EU Universities then. The aim of iPEAR project was to contribute to mainstreaming AR in higher education.