Making immersive technology accessible for art and design teaching

‘ACCELERATE: Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design’ bought together art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Ukraine to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education teaching to explore new possibilities for pedagogy and digital innovation. The project focused on the potential transformative role of immersive technologies (augmented, virtual, and extended reality) in the teaching of art and design while recognising that many learners face significant challenges in engaging effectively with XR technologies: disabilities; complex personal circumstances; low quality devices; poor and unreliable internet access. This 2-year Erasmus + ‘Strategic Partnership’ (2021-23) had a simple but ambitious aim: to improve the teaching of art and design at higher education in a post-pandemic Europe through the development of innovative methodologies, tools, platforms, and resources for accessible immersive learning. Drawing on the spirit of practice-led creative innovation, ACCELERATE created a new prototype platform for accessible immersive teaching in art and design that aimed to democratise XR technology. The collaborative development of this immersive ecosystem—open-source, scalable, sustainable—as a gateway for art and design lecturers and students with little or no previous experience of XR technologies was informed by a considered evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 on art and design teaching at the partner universities, the co-drafting of a Methodological guide, and a standalone online training course for lecturers populated with teaching materials, including co-created case studies that draw on the shared expertise and perspectives of all the project partners. By engaging with the layered complexities of XR accessibility and immersive learning, ACCELERATE has the capacity to be genuinely pioneering in its pedagogical and technological outcomes and find new ways of engaging with art and design students from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups