Immersive Interactive Educational Experiences – Adopting Education 5.0, Industry 4.0 Learning Technologies for Malaysian Universities

Immersive and interactive educational experiences (2I2E, for short) is the future of teaching and learning, combining the best of Education 5.0 and Industry 4.0 learning technologies to engage learners from the present generation whose style of learning is unique to the digital age. However, creating immersive and interactive educational experiences is a real challenge for educators, especially those without technological know-how and those who do not see the importance of investing in the creation of technology-based educational contents. In this research paper, we highlight our efforts in trying to create immersive and interactive educational experiences to teach job-related skills for Industry 4.0 future workers. Taking onboard the notion of gamification and putting game-based element in what we term as ‘learning sims’ (learning simulations), we can strongly argue that these types of immersive and interactive educational experiences are the future of teaching and learning at Malaysian universities. However, there are many obstacles to the wider implementation of immersive and interactive educational experiences at Malaysian universities, for instance limited time for content development, limited technical and programming knowledge, and particularly limited financial resources to procure development software and state-of-the-art hardware to test these ‘educational experiences’. In addition, the definition of what counts as engaging is constantly shifting, to the point where all content developers must be ready to be at the cutting edge. That said, the demand to create more and more immersive and interactive experiences continues to grow not just within the field of education but also in other areas like medical science and high technology manufacturing. Whatever it is, we believe that new learning technologies and educational experiences are not merely fads, they are glimpses of tomorrow’s world, based on critical comments given by end users (university students) of a keystone project that we are working on called ‘ELSA 360°-Videos’