Along with Industry 4.0’s disruption into HEIs’ curriculum, it is impacting education’s pedagogy – simply put, Industry 4.0 is requiring HEIs to evolve in both what it teaches and how.  Klippel, Zhao, Jackson, La Femina, Stubbs, Wetzel, Blair, Wallgrün, Oprean (2019) went as far as to say “immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality [elements of Industry 4.0] are transforming education” (p. 1746).  Augmented (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) technologies provide “certain characteristics of immersive technologies [that] lend themselves to advancing critical teaching approaches in academic disciplines” (Klippel et al., 2019, p. 1747).  

Consider how A.R. and V.R. technologies can “place learners into the real world with a specific problem that is relevant to a location [that enables] a more direct connection to key learning points that learners can understand and use to become more engaged” (Klippel et al., 2019, p. 1747).  Ventura, Brivio, Riva, and Boños (2019) explained that “V.R. has shown to be an efficacious instrument in assessing cognitive functions such as attention, memory, and executive functions” – all of which are vital to increasing a student’s self-efficacy, knowledge base, and application (p. 1).  Those benefits seem logical when one considers how a student could not only be told about how “something came into existence” but, through an immersive experience, watch the transformation (Klippel et al., 2019, p. 1750).  

It is not surprising then to see A.R. and V.R. technologies have 

“been successfully applied to several areas such as medicine, product design and manufacturing, education, tourism, cultural heritage, and human-computer interaction, in a wide range of contexts (e.g., entertainment, training rehabilitation) and goals (e.g., learning improvement, knowledge dissemination, public participation promotion, and medical patient recovery support)” (Adão, Pádua, Fonseca, Agrellos, Sousa, Magalhães, Peres, 2018, p. 442).   

The integration of such technology into HEIs’ pedagogy is no simple task.  This requires faculty professional development, expert instruction, and potential curriculum adjustments – all of which, in a traditional model, require committee reviews, approvals, and guidance that could take years.  This time-line to formally address the technology that will benefit a learner could be improved and transformed before the traditional HEI could process the original version.  

The speed in which the technology is advancing is forcing HEIs to evolve their operational processes and internal training – not to mention the cultural transition to one that functions in a constant state of change.  Industry 4.0 is forcing the educators’ role to transition from one that is a “master of knowledge to that of [a] facilitator and mentor, someone who guides learners on their journey of knowledge” (Mohd Adnan, Abd Karim, Haniff Mohd Tahir, Mustafa Kamal, & Muhyiddin Yusof, 2019, p. 334). 

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