Educational Practices and Strategies with Immersive Learning Environments: Mapping of Reviews for using the Metaverse

I'm extremely happy. These results will help out a lot of people working in Educational Technology research. And perhaps in many other areas. If you work in wicked problem areas, in complexity, take a look.

This is not your typical "one more for the heap" review.

Educational Practices and Strategies with Immersive Learning Environments: Mapping of Reviews for using the Metaverse
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10041969

So much to unpack here. Let's start!

First, getting the bean counting out of the way. These results came out in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, a Q1 top-10 journal in e-learning (Scimago), WoS IF 4.433, Q1 WoS JCR (Education & Educational Research), Q1 Scopus (Computer Science Applications, Engineering, Education).

Now for the interesting stuff.

Unlike most reviews, we set to provide a way to navigate Immersive Learning Research not only now, but for the future. One that can be updated, tested, and validated or contradicted.

We also sought to enable people to do replicable and comparable "outcomes" research.

The problem with seeking outcomes in complex areas and wicked problems - like learning research, but many other, is that you're usually comparing apples and oranges. One might say "oh, I got these results with technology". Another might say "Funny enough, I got different results with the same technology". "That's a start, but how did you use that technology? How was it introduced and involved in the overall activities?"

So most educational technology research isn't really replicable or comparable.

And wishing for detailed pedagogical descriptions and details is mostly unfeasible in today's research panorama: publications still impose page limits. Publications do not require detailed descriptions of practice. Only traditional and commonplace approaches are replicable with some degree of confidence on their similarity.

So we approached this by creating a framework from the literature. By mapping what is being done, and how it is being done, instead of searching for effects, impacts, or outcomes.

Here's what you'll find:

1. A working definition of "educational practices", "educational strategies"

    This provides a way to analyse the literature of a complex field of practice by categorizing actual reported accounts into "uses" (previously defined), "practices", and "strategies". This goes from operational, no explicit rationale actions ("uses"), to tactical, explicit rationale "practices", all the way to big-picture guidelines, theories or even structured pedagogic plans ("strategies").

    Thus, you can position research at similar practice levels of its description, and hopefully get more comparable and reproducible results.

2. A way to map the literature of a complex field by mapping its practices to its strategies

 This enables you to focus your inquiry on related areas. Instead of navigating long lists or trees of topics, by mapping practices to strategies, you can visualize clusters of affinity... and either focus your literature inquiries on those, of seek out connections and reports between distant clusters and nodes, to identify innovators or opportunities for innovation and discovery. 

3. An application of this to Immersive Learning Research

    We present the practices and strategies we identified in the field's literature and the clusters they formed when related to each other, providing a map. This outcome serendipitously looked like a brain, so it was dubbed "the Immersive Learning Brain". There is no intent to link it to actual biological brains!

4. This method can be scrutinized!

               The way we map practices to strategies:

                              - can be subjected to large-scale inquiry;

                              - can be redrawn with different criteria;

                              - enables those redrawings to be compared (for example, compare the theoretical affinity we used with actual co-occurrence in field reports).

We hope thus that this in itself can aid immersive learning researchers and practitioners directly, but also researchers in many other areas, who can adopt similar approaches to map their fields and, from then on, pursue more grounded research questions. Hopefully, to make insightful discoveries!