One of the most significant challenges in deploying XR at an institution of higher education, according to David Woodbury, department head of Learning Spaces & Services for the NCSU Libraries, is deploying "consumer technology in an enterprise environment." At present, most of the XR technology being used in higher education is designed for the consumer market, with the implicit assumption of a single purchaser and a single end user—an assumption that clearly does not match the situation at institutions of higher education. And because of this assumption, many vendors do not offer an enterprise license or an educational license. So when an institution gets to the point of installing and wanting to license XR development software on multiple computers, there may be no good way to do this short of multiple transactions. This is inefficient and expensive and, as anyone who has ever dealt with software licensing knows, tends to result in a proliferation of installs of the free or trial version rather than a licensed version. This situation is bad for both the vendor and the user. At many institutions of higher education, the IT unit maintains a repository of software, under enterprise licenses, that can be installed by members of the campus community. Vendors in the XR space seeking to gain a foothold in the education marketplace would do well to offer enterprise licenses for educational institutions.

The consumer marketplace assumption of a single end user also has implications for managing XR technology. Some issues here are quite simple: in a lab or hardware lending situation, headsets and handheld controllers should be cleaned after each use, just as one wipes down equipment in the gym after a workout. Ensuring the cleanliness of XR hardware, not to mention the cost of antibacterial wipes, must fall to some unit on campus. Other issues here are more complex. The scheduling system in a lab must enable users to book time with XR hardware. If XR technology is being lent out through the library or other campus unit, the circulation system must contain rules for access permissions, loan times, etc. The NCSU Libraries lends XR hardware as part of its technology lending program. The Libraries will also mail books to users remote from campus on request, through campus mail and even to homes. As of this writing, NCSU Libraries staff are discussing mailing XR and other technology to users, which raises several issues: how to package it, what to do if it is damaged in transit or goes missing, what pieces of technologies can be packaged together to make kits for specific use cases.

The prospect of mailing kits of relatively expensive hardware to users off campus is enough to give many IT staff heart palpitations. To even consider such a thing requires a fairly high risk tolerance by the campus unit responsible for the technology, as well as a deep commitment to providing user-focused services. Which brings us to perhaps the most critical factor that influences institutional deployment of XR: staffing. For most of the staff who work with XR on campus at institutions participating in this study, XR is just one part of their job. The Blended Reality Applied Research Project at Yale is headed by a combination of faculty members and staff in the campus IT unit. The XR initiative at Hamilton College is led by the Research and Instructional Design (R&ID) team in the Library & Information Technology Services unit. XR technology is supported at NCSU by library staff. XR technology at FIU is supported by the professional and student staff of the Miami Beach Urban Studios facility. The one exception to this absence of staff dedicated solely to XR on campus is the full-time director of the Emerging Technologies Consortium at Columbia University—and even there, the scope of the ETC is all emerging technologies, not just XR. At all of these institutions, XR is only one service offering supported by these campus units. All of the staff supporting XR at these institutions, therefore, need to be both extremely knowledgeable and extremely flexible. IT staff must be able to help users with teaching and learning aspects of the technology, for example, and instructional designers must be able to help with technical problems. This flexibility requires cross-disciplinary teams: examples include initiatives that span academic units, such as those at Yale and Columbia, and academic units that were created to be cross-disciplinary, such as the LITS unit at Hamilton or MBUS at FIU. The service model for the campus unit supporting XR needs to be equally innovative, as with the technology lending program at NCSU, and the creation of a dedicated staff position at Columbia.

This innovativeness and commitment to service do not just happen; these are values that can be fostered by institutional leadership. Organizational culture exerts a significant influence on the deployment of XR on campus, though organizational culture cannot be laid entirely at the feet of institutional leadership. Prior EDUCAUSE research has shown that leadership, and in particular the CIO and the enterprise architect (at those institutions that have one), has considerable influence over strategic direction and the enterprise-wide vision of technology and services.1 Institutional leaders might be risk-averse, or they might encourage risk-taking. They might keep XR technology under lock and key, available to students only for course-related projects and with their instructor's permission, or they might encourage its use by providing access through services available to the entire campus community, such as a lab or a makerspace, or a technology lending service. Institutional leaders might slam on the brakes by re-allocating resources away from an existing campus XR initiative, or they might support XR efforts on campus by providing resources. As with so many things in institutions of higher education (and in organizations generally), an institution's vision of itself as innovative translates directly into the level of support provided to students and faculty for innovative efforts. And ultimately, this vision is largely a reflection of institutional leadership.