i-Tech: Empowering Educators to Bring Experimental Learning to Classrooms

The integration of technology in education has gained significant attention, with Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and 360° VR emerging as transformative tools for enhancing student learning experiences. Despite their potential benefits, these immersive technologies have not achieved widespread adoption in education. Educators face numerous challenges in finding suitable 360° content for their courses and integrating complex content creation tools. Creating educational 360° content often involves hiring programmers or mastering intricate programming techniques, which can be time-consuming and daunting. Educators also struggle with finding platforms to host, edit, segment video content according to topics, and add subtitles and translations to their 360° videos. To address these challenges, this paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a user-friendly prototype tool with a step-by-step graphical user interface. This high-fidelity prototype assists educators in uploading 360° content, segmenting it into chapters or topics, incorporating questions or requirements within video segments, adding subtitles and translations, and facilitating content sharing among educators. This design aims to assist teachers in publishing their 360° content while reducing the complex VR programming for them. It enables them to integrate immersive learning in their classrooms with ease. The final goal is to promote greater adoption of 360° VR content in education and enhance learning outcomes.

@article{Alqarni2024,
  title     = {i-Tech: Empowering Educators to Bring Experimental Learning to Classrooms},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {15},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Amani Alqarni and Jieyu Wang and Abdullah Abuhussein},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0150258},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0150258}
}