Comparing approaches for selection, development, and deployment of extended reality (XR) teaching applications: A case study at The University of Newcastle Australia

The use of extended reality (XR) technology in education offers many advantages for transferring knowledge and practical skills training at the higher education level. As a result, many Universities over the past 5 + years have undertaken pilot programs to both develop XR content and assess how to best implement it within existing teaching and learning systems. Unfortunately, very few of these efforts have included structured evaluation or documentation. As such, limited published evidence exists to inform processes and approaches that may assist or hinder broad scale implementation. This leads many Universities to unnecessarily commit significant time and resources to testing identical or similar approaches, resulting in repeated identification of the same or similar challenges. In response to this situation, The University of Newcastle, Australia decided to systematically document the approach for selection, development and implementation of four new virtual-reality (VR) teaching applications. The current paper contains a detailed intrinsic case study, outlining the process and critical elements that shaped the selection of suitable teaching content, software development, hardware solutions and implementation. Details are provided on how decisions were made, what components were considered helpful, challenges identified, and important lessons outlined. These findings will be useful to organisations and individuals as they look to develop pathways and processes to integrate XR technology, particularly within their existing training and educational frameworks.