Importance Of AR Adoption In Education

In this era where information can be instantly obtained by making a simple search on the internet, the didactic way of teaching and mugging up facts is no longer in vogue. Instead of splitting learning into theoretical and practical classes, education is now being imparted holistically, including different forms of multimedia-rich content to hold the Gen Z learner’s ever-shortening attention span. Now via the use of Augmented reality in the classrooms, exceptional learning and teaching experiences can be offered by turning a conventional classroom into an interactive and engaging environment.

The global market for AR in Education is estimated at $760.4 Mn in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of $41.8 Bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 77.2% over the period 2020-2027, mentioned a report published by Researchandmarkets.com.

Augmented reality in education provides the visual representation of the learning material and enables teachers to impart interactive learning through multimedia-rich lessons while it allows learners to see visual information layered on the top of their real-world surroundings, presented through digital devices like projectors and interactive whiteboards.

How AR Is Being Used Education

Interactive AR learning has a significant impact on the student’s progress as it keeps learners engaged by incorporating the components of practical learning in the classroom.

A recent study has reported that visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.

Power Of Visualization:

Interactive Classes: Interactive AR converts the classroom environment including the classroom walls and whiteboards into gesture-controlled knowledge surfaces, on which teachers can pull different forms of multimedia content like images and videos and illustrate them to the students.

Increased Memory: The enhanced version of content appeals visually to the students and sticks-in long term memory, resulting in better learning outcomes.

Imagine a teacher writing human heart on the AR whiteboard which then recognizes the topic and presents students with a view of the 3D cross-section visualizing the arteries and veins of the heart and understanding the circulation of blood in it. The natural interaction on the whiteboard allows teachers to annotate the human heart with more explanation while allowing students to collaborate simultaneously on the whiteboard. Activity-based learning helps students get more learning in less time and with an enhanced learning experience.

Digital projections and visualizations of these concepts leave a lasting impact on students, making it easier for them to understand the concept and perform better in their exams.

Enhanced Learning Environment:

Write anything on the blackboard and an AR-powered device tracks, understands and transforms the blackboard content into digital content. It empowers even those teachers who are still teaching in a traditional system and gives them a feeling of freedom along with control over the teaching style — while harnessing the benefits of technology. The device understands the commands given to it like save or print a copy and makes content easy to share as well as reuse it.

The object recognition and text recognition feature in AR help teachers to overlay information, visuals, and different forms of content on an ordinary chalkboard, providing contextual and the most relevant results, to enhance learning.

For an instance, if you write an apple on the chalkboard turned information surface powered by AR technology, you can view the nutritional information of it. By doing this, the technology not only reduces the time to find the object’s description and other information but also creates a stronger link between the object image and its data. As a result, information is available faster and retained longer in the learner’s mind.

Interaction Based learning:

Tracking the real-time facial expressions of students including their happy, excited, curious, boring, and sad states of mind becomes possible, giving an insight into their knowledge gain of the topic. Like, if history class post-lunch is capturing most of the students in a sleepy state, the faculty can think about swapping the schedule to a more appropriate time for an information-heavy class.

Intelligent Student Response Capture System: The fiducial-based system in AR understands the patterns shown by the students during polls, quizzes, and feedback sessions via placards and captures their response, comprehends, and counts the vote. It encourages activity-based learning by understanding students’ and teachers’ gestures in the classroom. AR finds the patterns programmed in the system and acts on it as soon as it finds similar gestures.

Conclusion

The augmented reality in education makes teaching surfaces more intelligent, enables digital devices to capture and generate a lot of relevant insights, which are used to enhance the students’ learning experience, and creates a powerful impact in the entire ecosystem. It pushes the traditional limits and offers an interesting and engaging way to learn and grasp the concepts.

Considering the offered benefits of AR, more and more educational institutions are implementing it into their classrooms, by converting their regular walls, chalkboards or whiteboards into AR surfaces to make learning and teaching more effective than ever.

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