Institutions of higher education are hotbeds of innovation, but that heating is uneven. The deployment of new technologies and practices can vary widely among institutions and even among units within the same institution.

Institutions of higher education have a long history of integrating new technologies into teaching and learning and into their organizational practices broadly. In the mid-2000s, mobile devices were the subject of special projects to evaluate their use cases on campus;1 now, 99% of students come to campus with a smartphone.2 Around the same time, learning management systems were also the subject of special projects by campus IT units,3 but now a learning management system (LMS) is deployed at nearly all US institutions.4 These technologies have set the stage for the digital transformation5 of the higher education landscape.

XR technology, too, is being integrated into institutions of higher education. EDUCAUSE research has found that the use of XR for teaching and learning is still relatively low: only about 4% of undergraduate students have access to VR headsets, and of those students, a significant majority (approximately 72%) personally own them.6 Furthermore, sales of XR headsets are increasing,7 and as happened with mobile devices, the integration of a technology into higher education often lags behind the more widespread diffusion of that technology in society at large. Demand clearly exists in higher education, and on both sides of the classroom: more than half (53%) of students would like their instructors to make greater use of simulations, and almost two-thirds (62%) would like their instructors to use more online content to supplement other course materials.8 Likewise, instructors agree that they could be more effective if they were better skilled at integrating simulations (61%) and using online content to supplement other course materials (64%).9 XR technology is, of course, only one type of simulation and supplementary online content, but it is an increasingly important type, as it has the potential to facilitate creative new pedagogic strategies and enable students to gain new kinds of skills and credentials.

But if XR is to be used in institutions of higher education, it is important to be realistic about how to use it effectively. XR holds the potential to be a game changer for higher education, but it must be deployed thoughtfully in order to fulfill this potential.

HP launched the Campus of the Future project to facilitate the adoption and integration of XR into higher education. EDUCAUSE has always been in the business of investigating how institutions of higher education can most productively deploy technology; current research turns this lens on XR.

This report is a result of this collaboration between HP and EDUCAUSE. The 2018 Learning in Three Dimensions report was an exploration of XR technologies in higher education. The 2019 XR for Teaching and Learning report, expanding on the findings of that original report, identified factors that influence the effectiveness of XR technologies for achieving various learning goals, as well as methods for integrating XR into pedagogy to support those learning goals. This report builds on all of this prior work. The study reported here was a multiple case study, informed by 47 interviews with people at 17 institutions across the United States, about the deployment and use of XR technology at these institutions. (See appendix B for more details on the methodology.) This study identified organizational factors that influence how XR technology is adopted and deployed within institutions of higher education, and it describes service models that have been implemented to support the use of that technology by the campus community.