Extended Reality in Education: Analysis of Benefits, Risks and Design Challenges

Extended Reality (XR) represents one of the most promising innovations for transforming teaching and learning processes. This paper highlights how immersive technologies can foster student engagement, motivation and experiential learning, promoting forms of experiential learning based on the ‘learning by doing’ paradigm and supporting processes of personalisation and inclusion. Particular attention is paid to the pedagogical integration of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) within the TPACK framework, a well-known theoretical model that describes the balanced integration of disciplinary, pedagogical and technological knowledge. At the same time, the paper explores the issues associated with the adoption of XR in education, including cybersickness, cognitive overload, psychological and social implications, ethical and privacy concerns related to the collection of biometric data, as well as infrastructural and economic challenges.