Welcome to XR's world of education

We notice this when implementing the Open and Online Education Incentive Scheme by SURF on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. This scheme enables universities and colleges to experiment with forms of online education and the sharing and reuse of OERs. The last round of the scheme started in 2022. In this round, it was notable that more than half of the projects were dominated by XR. In the previous rounds of grants, only a single project per year was involved.

Project leaders who started XR projects in 2022 run into several issues, such as: how do I get colleagues enthusiastic about XR? How do I get from experiment to scale-up? How do I make sure the content is easy to share with others? The Education Innovation with ICT Acceleration Plan 2020-2022 saw similar experience. We picked up several examples around XR in education. And here too, on the one hand, nice experiments, but on the other, many questions.

To explore the questions in more depth, we organised a pressure cook session at the end of 2022, in which we asked forerunners from the education field about solution directions, needs and opportunities. We further developed the results into this publication. What is striking is the enormous enthusiasm of the people who are now working on XR in education. XR offers new possibilities and added value for education and we show that in this issue. At the same time, we reflect on the various challenges that remain in the field of XR.

The issue is a prelude to the developments to come. We hope to work on these challenges together with the institutions and certainly also with the projects currently running in the Incentive Scheme.

Annette Peet and Sjieuwke Dankert

Project Managers Open and Online Education Incentive Scheme, SURF