Adoption of Augmented Reality in Distance Education: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) has garnered significant attention in the field of education over the last two decades, with data indicating that it improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning in a variety of academic environments. There is, however, the absence of a framework that can guide the institution-wide adoption of AR in distance education. Distance Education (DE) has always been linked to advances in (educational) technology in terms of facilitating the transactional distance between providing institutions and learners, supporting them both synchronously and asynchronously, and providing educators with tools to improve pedagogy and resource utilisation. However, it is unclear why AR has yet to be institutionalised in distance and distributed learning environments. A scoping review was done to identify the enabling conditions for implementing AR in DE, and the results were deductively analysed. While the scoping review results did not reveal any frameworks or models that could guide the implementation of AR, it pointed out several factors to consider when adopting AR in a distance learning environment.