Use Cases & Trials
UC EDU 2 - Classroom of Future
XR-assisted Teaching and Learning for Virtualised 5G and Beyond Network Infrastructure
The Classroom of Future use case in UK targets to create a highly immersive and interactive teaching and learning environment for students to receive and enjoy high-quality learning experiences, comparable to physical reality, and in some cases, superior than the physical reality. With the increasing complexity of the wireless/mobile networking scenarios in 5G and beyond networks, it has become growingly challenging for university lecturers to effectively explain the complicated networking technologies such as virtualisation, softwarisation, multitenancy etc. to students in the computer networking discipline. These students often find it difficult to understand such new concepts coupled with the conventional telecommunication infrastructure. Moreover, hybrid teaching and learning has become a norm in universities since the pandemic, and thus innovative approaches have been required to manage such new educational settings whilst keeping comparable quality for the higher education. The successful implementation of this use case is expected to showcase the use of XR technologies, coupled with realistic beyond 5G infrastructure, can greatly facilitate the teaching and learning experience of complex virtualised beyond 5G networking concepts.
Partners
Use Case Overall
Remote online learning has become a norm around the world during pandemic, and it remains popular in many countries in the post-pandemic era due to the benefits observed in this approach such as the widened inclusion of potential students, higher flexibility in teaching and learning styles, higher efficiency, improved affordability and accessibility, and the hybrid working pattern for education professionals, among other constraints. Extended Reality (XR) technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), have emerged as promising solutions in a variety of applications including education, entertainment, gaming, healthcare, industry 4.0/5.0 use cases and so on. This Classroom of Future will be able offer immersive and media-rich lecture delivery. This also help disseminate the knowledge and knowhow learnt from 6G-PATH and other relevant projects. Moreover, it will enable interactive group discussions regardless of the physical distances among the students. Students will be organised into groups of various sizes as appropriate to collaborate with each other in order to complete a joint task e.g., a problem-solving task, promoting teamworking and in-class experiences.
In this use case, a set of lecturers and professors compose a delivery team where they are making use of wearable devices and haptic controllers to manipulate a virtual world where a complete 6G network topology is represented, allowing them to control the delivery of the class being able to provide immersive, adaptive 3D realistic representation of the complete infrastructure. This is achieved by the creation of advanced applications for that particular purpose based on several toolkits such as MRTK and Unity for the creation of the virtual world. This information will be distributed to the remote attendance of the class. This is composed by other campuses where students are attending physically to classroom but also to students that are remotely attending from home. Notice the challenges associated to this educational environment where there will be heterogeneous networks to each of the students and quality of services which is a significant challenge and combining this with the ultrahigh requirements in terms of latency, bandwidth, jittering and packet losses required by the holographic and haptic communications. The use case will be complemented with an application that allows to perform the digital twin over the same testbed being used to perform the delivery of this use case. It will allow the lecturers and professor to perform real-time monitoring over the complete infrastructure but also to deliver such operational capabilities to the students as a way to really deliver hands-on experience over the real infrastructure.
Key Objectives
Improving Learning Outcomes
By providing an immersive and engaging learning experience based on XR and 6G, this Classroom of Future can potentially significantly improve learning effectiveness for students. The use of XR technologies can create a more interactive and stimulating learning environment, presenting a new world of 5G/6G technological insights to the students in a visualised fashion not existing in the real world, which can increase student engagement and retention.
Enhancing Collaborative Learning
Such a Classroom of Future will support highly collaborative learning, which is an important feature of the modern education environment. By facilitating real-time collaboration and group discussions, students can work together to solve problems and learn from each other, nurturing the culture of being a team player, an essential personal merit to handle complex problems in real-world projects.
Enhancing Accessibility
The use of such a Classroom of Future can boost the accessibility of education, especially for students who are unable to attend physical classes due to distance or other factors e.g., finance difficulties. By providing a highly realistic virtual learning environment with capabilities to visualise the world behind the hardware and other 5G/6G elements, students can access high-quality education from anywhere at an affordable cost.
Expected Innovations/Outcomes
Driving Overall 6G Development
The deployment of 6G technology from 6G-PATH for Classroom of Future can provide an ideal testbed for the development and optimisation of 6G considering the multi-level requirements posed from 6G infrastructure including edge computing, XR devices, network and application performance as well as user experience. By testing this 6G use case in a realistic environment, it can accelerate the deriving of various related KPIs from these different perspectives to drive further development of new 6G technologies and applications.
Driving Advanced B5G Network Slicing Development
The advances of B5G network slicing technologies from 6G-PATH can ensure that the demanding Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the XR-assisted Classroom of Future use case can be satisfied, and thus help the adoption of the such innovative technologies to the education sector.
Driving the B5G Experimental Platform Development
The advances of B5G experimental platform from 6G-PATH can facilitate the deployment, testing and validation of the Classroom of Future use case, providing more insights of the KPIs and KVIs for this use case.
KPIs
| KPI | Description | Objective |
|---|---|---|
Newly developed XR application | Develop new XR teaching and learning materials | >= 2 |
Visualised devices | Number of supported networked devices to be visualised in the same topology in the subject domain (5G and beyond) | >=1000 |
Visualised connections | Number of supported connections among devices to be visualised in the same topology in the subject domain (5G and beyond) | >=2000 |
Key technological concept visualisation | Number of visualised key technological concepts (visual representation) in the subject domain (5G and beyond) | >=3 (e.g., virtual machines, multitenancy, virtual equipment and interfaces, which would be difficult to explain without XR-based visualisation) |
Key business scenario visualisation | Number of visualised key business roles and scenarios (visual representation) in the subject domain (5G and beyond) | >= 2 (e.g., Infrastructure Service Provider and Infrastructure Service Consumer, and their business scenarios, which would be difficult to explain without XR-based visualisation) |
KVIs
| KVIs | Description | Objective |
|---|---|---|
Student satisfaction | High satisfaction rate from the students | >=70% |
Academic performance | High students performance vs. the performance in a control group (understanding the complicated 5G and beyond topology) | >=20% (compared with a control group) |
Perceived usefulness | High perceived usefulness ratio for teaching and learning experience | >70% |
Use Case Alignment with UN SDGs
The Classroom of the Future use case leverages XR and 6G to deliver accessible, immersive, and collaborative education to distributed learners, directly advancing SDGs on quality education, digital innovation and reduced inequalities.
Ensures inclusive and equitable quality education, bridging educational gaps and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all by providing immersive XR learning experiences and digital resources
(Target 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5).
Advances digital infrastructure, fosters innovation, and increases access to advanced ICT for education by deploying 6G and XR technologies in real-world educational settings (Target 9.1, 9.c).
Boosts accessibility for students who cannot attend physical classes, reducing educational inequalities due to geography, mobility, or other barriers (Target 10.2).
Trial: AR-assisted Teaching and Learning for Virtualised 5G and Beyond Network Infrastructure
- June 2025
- United Kingdom
The trial aims to investigate the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) in enhancing teaching and learning experiences in higher education. Specifically, the study focuses on the application of XR in understanding complex networking systems, such as 5G and beyond, which are often challenging to teach and learn using traditional methods. By exploring the benefits and challenges of XR in education, the study seeks to contribute to the creation of improved educational tools and methodologies that can be adopted across European universities. In particular, the study will focus on Key Value Indicators (KVIs) such as reduced operational costs, efficient resource utilization, increased productivity, improved academic performance, skill acquisition, enhanced accessibility, user satisfaction, and engagement for both students and teachers.