Categorisation of the benefits and limitations of immersive technologies for education

Virtual and augmented reality have become attractive technologies for application in educational setups. Hence, instructional designers are still struggling with the questions of whether immersive technologies can help to solve their current instructional problems and of how they should be incorporated into the educational program. This paper should bring us a step closer to the solution of this issue by proposing an extensive categorisation of the advantages and disadvantages of VR and AR technology for education. It was iteratively developed based on literature review, expert interviews and user reports. Each benefit category was assigned to the technological features such as multimodality, interactivity and visual-spatial representation that may bring forth the wished benefits. Additionally, some examples serve for a better understanding of how the benefits manifest themselves.