As higher and further education responds to rapid technological change, educators are being challenged to prepare students not only with disciplinary knowledge, but with the skills, confidence, and adaptability needed to thrive in emerging professional environments. This is particularly true in engineering, where graduates are entering fields shaped by digital transformation, sustainability pressures, and increasingly complex workplace demands.
It is in this context that Alliance4XR, an Erasmus+ project co-funded by the European Union, has particular significance. Alliance4XR seeks to empower higher education institutions (HEIs) and vocational education and training (VET) centres by co-creating a practical methodology for integrating extended reality (XR) into education, with a specific focus on engineering-related areas such as structural engineering, energy, and maritime. The project is designed to address a clear and growing challenge: the mismatch between the XR-related digital skills learners need and the training opportunities currently available within tertiary education and vocational settings.
Recent studies and sectoral reports suggest that there remains a significant gap in XR theory and practice within higher and further education and training. This gap has consequences beyond education itself. It contributes to skills shortages across industries and can slow innovation, commercial development, and workforce readiness in sectors where immersive technologies are increasingly relevant (Burke et al., 2025; Muzata et al., 2024). Alliance4XR responds to this challenge by co-creating and testing a tailored teaching and training methodology, alongside materials that can strengthen the capacity of HEIs and VET providers to address both technological and access-to-market challenges facing students and trainees as they enter engineering professions.
Yet while the skills agenda is important, the value of XR in education goes beyond employability alone. XR matters not simply because it is new, but because it has the potential to support richer forms of learning. For engineering education especially, XR offers possibilities for immersive, applied, and embodied learning that can help students connect theory and practice in powerful ways.
A useful starting point here is the work of Seymour Papert. Although Papert was writing long before today’s XR ecosystem, his ideas remain strikingly relevant. Papert’s theory of constructionism emphasised that learners build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in making, testing, designing, and reflecting on meaningful experiences or artefacts (Papert, 1991). Learning, in this view, is not about passively absorbing information. It is about constructing understanding through activity and inquiry.
This has important implications for the educational use of XR. At its best, XR enables students to do more than listen, watch, or memorise. It creates environments in which they can interact, explore, rehearse, manipulate, and reflect. In engineering education, this is particularly valuable because the discipline depends on more than conceptual recall. Students must develop spatial understanding, procedural knowledge, design awareness, and the capacity to respond to real-world complexity. XR can support this by making abstract systems more visible, allowing students to explore how components interact, and creating more dynamic opportunities for problem-solving and applied learning (Oje et al., 2023; Suhail et al., 2024).
This is especially important in fields like structural engineering, energy, and maritime education, where students are often dealing with systems that are technically complex, large in scale, or difficult to access directly in everyday teaching contexts. XR offers opportunities to simulate these environments in ways that make learning more immediate and authentic. Rather than relying solely on lectures, diagrams, or isolated demonstrations, students can engage with immersive scenarios that allow them to visualise structures, navigate systems, and test decisions in context. In this sense, XR can help bridge one of the perennial challenges in engineering education: the gap between knowing and doing.
For Alliance4XR, then, XR is not simply a technical tool. It is part of a wider educational response to the evolving needs of both learners and industry. If students and trainees are to enter the workplace equipped for current and emerging roles, they need opportunities to engage with technologies that are already reshaping engineering practice. But they also need these technologies to be embedded within meaningful pedagogies. Papert’s work is a useful reminder that powerful technology alone does not guarantee powerful learning. The educational value lies in what students are enabled to do with it.
A second important reason XR matters in engineering education is its potential to support engagement with sustainability. Engineering students today are preparing for professions that will play a central role in responding to climate change, energy transition, resilient infrastructure, and environmental responsibility. Sustainability is therefore not an optional add-on to engineering education. It is part of its core purpose.
One of the challenges, however, is that sustainability issues can remain abstract when taught only through text, diagrams, or data. Students may understand the language of environmental impact, systems failure, or climate resilience, but still struggle to connect these ideas to material and human consequences. XR can help here by making sustainability issues more immediate, embodied, and affectively engaging.
Research on immersive learning suggests that XR can foster not only cognitive understanding, but also emotional and reflective engagement (Burke et al., 2025). Studies on immersive virtual reality and environmental learning have shown that embodied experiences can influence how learners perceive climate issues and their own relationship to the natural world (Pi et al., 2025; Spangenberger et al., 2024). This is relevant for engineering because sustainability is not just a technical matter. It also involves ethics, responsibility, and judgment. If students can experience, rather than merely observe, the implications of flooding, energy inefficiency, environmental degradation, or fragile infrastructures, their learning may become more grounded and more urgent.
This kind of visceral response matters. Learning is not purely intellectual. It is also embodied and emotional. In engineering education, students need space to grapple with the fact that design decisions have consequences for people, places, and futures. XR can help create those spaces by allowing learners to inhabit scenarios, explore consequences, and reflect on choices in ways that are difficult to achieve through traditional teaching alone. In doing so, it can support a more holistic understanding of engineering practice — one that recognises the technical, social, and environmental dimensions of professional decision-making.
A third major strength of XR lies in its capacity to support skills development in dangerous, inaccessible, or high-risk environments. This is one of the most compelling educational arguments for XR in engineering. Many engineering professions require familiarity with settings or procedures that are difficult to replicate safely in routine teaching contexts. In maritime training, energy systems, or structural inspection, for example, students may need to learn how to respond to hazardous conditions, follow safety procedures, or operate within complex environments where errors could have serious consequences.
XR offers a powerful means of addressing this challenge. It allows learners to rehearse procedures, practise decision-making, and experience complex environments in ways that are realistic but safe. Students can repeat tasks, learn from mistakes, and build confidence without endangering themselves, others, or costly equipment. This makes immersive learning especially valuable in professional and vocational preparation.
The research base here is growing but still emerging. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Scorgie et al. (2024) found that virtual reality safety training outperformed traditional approaches in knowledge acquisition and retention. Likewise, Evangelista et al. (2025) found that immersive virtual reality training improved performance, knowledge transfer, and error reduction in confined-space safety training. These findings are highly relevant for Alliance4XR’s engineering focus. They suggest that XR can support not only learner engagement, but also competence development in contexts where safe rehearsal is essential.
Importantly, XR also allows aspects of practice to be slowed down, visualised, revisited, and reflected upon. Students can review decisions, examine sequences of action, and better understand why particular responses matter. This makes XR more than a simulation tool; it becomes a reflective learning environment. In higher and further education, that matters because students need not just exposure, but opportunities to develop confidence, judgement, and adaptive expertise.
However, it is also important to acknowledge the limitations of XR. Immersive environments can offer powerful learning opportunities, but they remain representations rather than substitutes for the full complexity of real engineering practice. Challenges around cost, infrastructure, staff capacity, accessibility, and learner comfort can all affect implementation. The evidence base is promising, but still emerging, particularly in relation to long-term impact, equitable access, and when XR offers clear advantages over other forms of teaching and training (Burke et al., 2025; Muzata et al., 2024).
These considerations highlight an important point: immersive technologies are most effective when they are grounded in clear learning aims and thoughtful pedagogy. Questions of cost, access, design quality, and staff capacity mean that institutions need support in building meaningful and sustainable approaches to XR integration (Burke et al., 2025). This is precisely why Alliance4XR is so timely. Its value lies not only in promoting XR, but in co-creating and testing a practical methodology and training materials that can help HEIs and VET providers use XR in purposeful, context-sensitive, and professionally relevant ways.
For engineering education in higher and further education, that is a significant opportunity. XR can make difficult concepts more tangible, sustainability issues more immediate, and hazardous professional settings safer to learn within. It can help students connect knowledge to practice, and practice to responsibility. Most importantly, it can support the development of graduates who are not only technically capable, but prepared to navigate the complexity of contemporary engineering work.
That is the promise of Alliance4XR. Not simply to introduce more technology into education, but to help institutions and training centres build the methodologies, materials, and capacity needed to use XR well. In doing so, the project contributes to a wider educational vision: one in which immersive learning supports not just skills development, but thoughtful, applied, and future-facing engineering education.
References:
Burke, D., Crompton, H., & Nickel, C. (2025). The use of extended reality (XR) in higher education: A systematic review. TechTrends, 69, 998–1011. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-025-01092-y
Evangelista, A., Manghisi, V. M., De Giglio, V., Mariconte, R., Giliberti, C., & Uva, A. E. (2025). From knowledge to action: Assessing the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality training on safety behaviors in confined spaces using the Kirkpatrick model. Safety Science, 181, Article 106693. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106693
Muzata, A. R., Singh, G., Stepanov, M. S., & Musonda, I. (2024). Immersive learning: A systematic literature review on transforming engineering education through virtual reality. Virtual Worlds, 3(4), 480–505. https://doi.org/10.3390/virtualworlds3040026
Oje, A. V., Hunsu, N. J., & May, D. (2023). Virtual reality assisted engineering education: A multimedia learning perspective. Computers & Education: X Reality, 3, 100033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cexr.2023.100033
Papert, S. (1991). Situating constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism (pp. 1–11). Ablex.
Pi, Y., Pan, X., Slater, M., & Świdrak, J. (2025). Embodied time travel in VR: From witnessing climate change to action for prevention. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 5, 1499835. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2024.1499835
Scorgie, D., Phillips, C., Xu, Y., Reddy, H., Lee, Y. M., Kim, H., & Shahabi, H. (2024). Virtual reality for safety training: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Safety Science, 170, 106372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106372
Spangenberger, P., Geiger, S. M., Freytag, A., & Schrader, U. (2024). Embodying nature in immersive virtual reality: Are multisensory stimuli vital to affect nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour? Computers & Education, 210, 104964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104964
Suhail, N. S., Bahroun, Z., & Ahmed, V. (2024). Augmented reality in engineering education: Enhancing learning and application. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 5, 1461145. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2024.1461145
