On 7 May 2026, the eTACCHE project hosted the fifth webinar in its ongoing series, this time turning to the question of how Extended Reality (XR) can be used to create immersive content for teacher education. The session was led by Dr Mareike Oesterle, coordinator of the eTACCHE project at Ludwigsburg University of Education, whose research focuses on the professional development of teacher educators in transnational contexts, with a particular interest in the role of emerging technologies such as AI and XR in teaching and learning.
The session opened by setting out the key concepts and terminology underpinning XR, distinguishing between Virtual Reality (VR), Social or Multi-User VR, and Augmented Reality (AR), and exploring the varying levels of immersion these technologies offer — from simple browser-based or cardboard-viewer experiences through to fully immersive headset-based environments.
From there, the discussion moved to the specific context of initial teacher education, outlining five key reasons why XR is increasingly being integrated into teacher training programmes: bridging the long-standing gap between theory and practice, providing safe and repeatable training environments, developing empathy through perspective-taking, supporting the acquisition of high-impact professional competencies, and acting as a catalyst for transforming pedagogical approaches more broadly. Particular attention was given to the specific value of XR for cultural heritage education, including its capacity to make geographically distant, fragile, or lost heritage accessible, and to support equity of access to cultural experiences that might otherwise be out of reach.
Drawing on the eTACCHE project’s own experience over the past two years, Dr Oesterle reflected candidly on the shift from open, exploratory experimentation with XR tools towards a more structured, product-based approach, in which trainee teachers design and trial concrete XR-supported lessons on the eTwinning platform. She also presented a working framework — developed by mapping XR use onto established models such as Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, the ICAP framework, TPACK, and DigCompEdu — for understanding the different roles that students and teachers can take on when working with XR, from Creator, Adapter, and Consumer roles on the student side, to Designer and Curator roles for teachers.
The webinar then turned to a practical overview of the current XR tool landscape, distinguishing between tools to consume, adapt, and create immersive content, before addressing one of the most pressing questions for practitioners: how to actually choose an appropriate XR tool for educational use. Here, participants were introduced to eight core considerations spanning both general educational-technology criteria — pedagogy, accessibility, data protection (GDPR compliance), and sustainability — and XR-specific factors, including the appropriate level of immersion, interactivity, physical safety, and evidence-based effectiveness.
Throughout the session, participants were invited to engage actively via live polls and a shared Padlet, exploring a curated selection of XR tools and reflecting on their own experiences and associations with XR in teaching, as well as trying out an XR scene created within a previous eTACCHE seminar.
