The progression and adoption of innovative learning methodologies signify that a respective part of society is open to new technologies and ideas and thus is advancing. The latest innovation in teaching is the use of Augmented Reality (AR). Applications using this technology have been deployed successfully in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education for delivering the practical and creative parts of teaching. Since AR technology already has a large volume of published studies about education that reports advantages, limitations, effectiveness, and challenges, classifying these projects will allow for a review of the success in the different educational settings and discover current challenges and future research areas. Due to COVID-19, the landscape of technology-enhanced learning has shifted more toward blended learning, personalized learning spaces and user-centered approach with safety measures. The main findings of this paper include a review of the current literature, investigating the challenges, identifying future research areas, and finally, reporting on the development of two case studies that can highlight the first steps needed to address these research areas. The result of this research ultimately details the research gap required to facilitate real-time touchless hand interaction, kinesthetic learning, and machine learning agents with a remote learning pedagogy.

Creating pedagogically sound, interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences supporting situated and experiential learning remains a challenge to teachers without programming skills. To integrate AR in the everyday classroom, teachers need to be capable of designing their own immersive experiences for their students, which is why an analysis of existing authoring toolkits is necessary to identify suitable tools for educational application development and future research directions in terms of educational AR. We identified “easy access”, “GUI-based design”, and “interactive contents” as needs of teachers for designing AR content for the classroom. Based on these needs, we conducted a literature review of 835 documents. Of 80 relevant articles, we included 43 peer-reviewed articles from ACM Digital Library, DBLP, IEEExplore, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and miscellaneous other sources in our analysis. We identified 69 different AR authoring toolkits and classified these with regard to their accessibility, their degree of required programming knowledge, and their interactivity. The results show a divergent research landscape with a lack of empirical evaluation. Of 26 openly accessible toolkits, we identified five toolkits addressing the defined needs of teachers for designing interactive AR experiences for the classroom without requiring extensive programming knowledge. We conclude that there are only few tools for the straightforward design of educational AR experiences addressing the needs of teachers and suggest using research-informed and evidence-based criteria for developing AR authoring toolkits for education.

The adoption of innovative wearable technologies is potentially increasing as a new trend. Jumping into the augmented reality (AR) and Metaverse, Facebook (now known as Meta) launched smart glasses partnering with Ray-Ban sunglasses brand’s parent company EssilorLuxottica. Ray-Ban stories has several technical features for entertainment and socializing; more importantly, these features can be adopted in the future for more advanced wearable. However, these smart glasses also came with many ethical and privacy concerns along with their potential benefits. Furthermore, the unbridled deployment of these smart glasses brought several challenging questions for public social interaction when we will have more such devices in our lives. This short article has discussed the Ray-Ban stories’ ethical and privacy issues for social interaction and public places.

Technology-enhanced education can potentially enhance teaching and learning outcomes for rural educators since they face limited educational resources and low job satisfaction. Recently, there has been a surge in extended reality (XR) as an immersive learning technology to improve teaching and learning in rural areas, but without focusing on rural educators’ perspectives. This study aims to bridge this gap by investigating rural educators’ interactions with XR educational applications and exhibiting their insights on using XR education to improve education quality in rural areas. After educators’ hands-on experiences in a pre-designed XR education workshop, qualitative data was collected from their discussions in focus groups. As a result, educators believed that XR could transform traditional educational practices and create opportunities for new patterns of rural education (e.g., public engagement with rurality and rural vocational education). Limitations include a lack of school infrastructure to apply XR and an absence of well-structured curriculum design to use XR in the classroom setting. We suggest that future studies explore the integration of effective XR practices into primary and elementary education in those areas with limited educational resources.