Digitalization in education is of great importance, especially in era of COVID-19 pandemic. Augmented Reality can help to this direction, bringing a range of benefits in the field of education. Prior researches reveal that AR enhances the students’ learning outcomes offering significant pedagogical affordance when it is used in the tutoring of different domains, such as astronomy, biology, geometry, physics etc. However, the exploration of the factors associated with the acceptance of the technology of AR in education, is yet limited. This article aims to present valuable information to researchers, tutors and AR application developers concerning the learners’ behavioral intention to use such technology in the learning process. The motivation of this study is the increasing use of AR in education, offering significant room for future research, and its novelty is the analysis of the most significant factors affecting the actual AR system use. This study is based on a modified Technology Acceptance Model, consisting of the four core constructs and extended by two external variables, namely playfulness and quality output, in order to consider both pedagogy and technology. The population that participated in this research includes 220 secondary school students. The results show that the intention to use AR is positively influenced directly by quality output, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, and indirectly by playfulness. The findings help AR developers to understand the factors that maximize the user’s experience prior to the application of AR technology in the digital era of education.

Innovative technology has been an important part of firefighting, as it advances firefighters’ safety and effectiveness. Prior research has examined the implementation of training systems using augmented reality (AR) in other domains, such as welding, aviation, army, and mathematics, offering significant pedagogical affordances. Nevertheless, firefighting training systems using AR are still an under-researched area. The increasing penetration of AR for training is the driving force behind this study, and the scope is to analyze the main aspects affecting the acceptance of AR by firefighters. The current research uses a technology acceptance model, extended by the external constructs of perceived interactivity and personalization, to consider both the system and individual level. The proposed model was evaluated by a sample of 200 users, and the results show that both the external variables of perceived interactivity and perceived personalization are prerequisite factors in extending the TAM model. The findings reveal that the usability is the strongest predictor of firefighters’ behavioral intentions to use the AR system, followed by the ease of use with smaller, yet meaningful, direct and indirect effects on firefighters’ intentions. The identified acceptance factors help AR developers enhance the firefighters’ experience in training operations.

This study investigates the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Religious Education (RE), a field traditionally rooted in spiritual formation and human interaction. Amid increasing digital transformation in education, theological institutions are exploring AI tools for teaching, assessment, and pastoral engagement. Using a critical literature review and analysis of institutional case studies, the paper examines the historical development of AI in education, current applications in general and theological contexts, and the ethical challenges it introduces, especially regarding decision making, data privacy, and bias as well as didactically grounded opportunities such as AI-mediated dialogic simulations. The study identifies both the pedagogical advantages of AI, such as personalization and administrative efficiency, and the risks of theological distortion, overreliance, and epistemic conformity. It presents a range of real-world implementations from institutions like Harvard Divinity School and the Oxford Centre for Digital Theology, highlighting best practices and cautionary approaches. The findings suggest that AI can enrich RE when deployed thoughtfully and ethically, but it must not replace the relational and formational aspects central to RE. The paper concludes by recommending policy development, ethical oversight, and interdisciplinary collaboration to guide responsible integration. This research contributes to the growing discourse on how AI can be aligned with the spiritual and intellectual goals of RE in a rapidly evolving digital age.

This review paper presents a systematic literature review on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in engineering education, and specifically in student’s spatial ability training, for the last decade. Researchers have explored the benefits of AR, and its application has been of increasing interest in all levels of education. Engineering students tend to have difficulties in acquiring visualization skills, and hence, AR is gaining momentum in enhancing students’ learning achievements. This paper aims to present valuable information to researchers, tutors and software developers of learning technology systems concerning the advantages and limitations of AR in spatial ability training, the incorporation of adaptivity and personalization in AR applications as well as the aspects of spatial ability having been evaluated using AR and the prevalent evaluation methods for AR applications. To this direction, a total of thirty-two (32) studies were reviewed, having been published since 2010. The findings reveal an increase in the number of studies during the last three years. One major conclusion is the improvement of learners’ spatial ability using AR in educational settings, and the noted challenge is the need for more learning content. One research gap that has been identified is the lack of personalization in the developed applications, offering space for future research. Concluding, this area is under-researched, and thus, there is scope for a lot of improvement.

Adaptive systems and Augmented Reality are among the most promising technologies in teaching and learning processes, as they can be an effective tool for training engineering students’ spatial skills. Prior work has investigated the integration of AR technology in engineering education, and more specifically, in spatial ability training. However, the modeling of user knowledge in order to personalize the training has been neither sufficiently explored nor exploited in this task. There is a lot of space for research in this area. In this work, we introduce a novel personalization of the learning path within an AR spatial ability training application. The aim of the research is the integration of Augmented Reality, specifically in engineering evaluation and fuzzy logic technology. During one academic semester, three engineering undergraduate courses related to the domain of spatial skills were supported by a developed adaptive training system named PARSAT. Using the technology of fuzzy weights in a rule-based decision-making module and the learning theory of the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcomes for the design of the learning material, PARSAT offers adaptive learning activities for the students’ cognitive skills. Students’ data were gathered at the end of the academic semester, and a thorough analysis was delivered. The findings demonstrated that the proposed training method outperformed the traditional method that lacked adaptability, in terms of domain expertise and learning theories, considerably enhancing student learning outcomes.