Synchronous hybrid learning allows physically distributed students and teachers to participate simultaneously in learning activities. Despite the growing interest in synchronous hybrid learning, there remains a need for further investigation into effective pedagogical approaches and technological implementations that support teacher-student interactions at the school level. Addressing this, we present a prototype of an in-house holographic telepresence environment for synchronous hybrid learning, demonstrated through an exploratory study connecting students and teachers across two continents. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the six participating teachers to understand their experiences and perceptions related to the application of holographic telepresence for synchronous hybrid learning. Thematic analysis of the interview data highlights the pedagogical challenges that teachers faced, identifies technological environment design improvements, and outlines new opportunities for enhancing synchronous hybrid learning experiences. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on leveraging immersive technologies to enhance education in diverse and geographically separated settings.

Existing communication technologies have displayed a lack of affordances in supporting social-emotional connections, which is of particular interest in educational settings. We are therefore developing a live sensory immersive 3D video technology, built on a prior developed platform. Pilot trials in a Finnish school have yielded promising findings. We continue to advance the state-of-the-art platform in parallel with regards to 3D capture quality and data compression algorithms. Current developments entail joint investigations and evaluations of affordances to support emotional, social, motivational, and achievement impacts with learners and teachers from a Namibian and Finnish school. Participants can experience ”remote presence” wearing the hololens 2 while others are live streamed from another country captured by two cameras.

We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

An increasing trend of digitally enhancing learning provides unique opportunities to expand from local to global learning environments. However, current technologies and educational approaches do not adequately support creative communication and learning for primary school learners across the globe. We maintain that it is important to promote agentic engagement amongst learners by involving them in the design of their own digitally enhanced learning environment. In this study, we connected ten learners from a Namibian and a Finnish school in virtual communications to co-design an interactive map game. Following a research through design approach, we share a detailed account of the case study in which we facilitated a distributed co-design process, using Skype, a custom made VR environment, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We reflect on the co-design sessions, focusing on communication and the design concept evolution contributing to distributed co-design methods and techniques not only for the design community but also as an agentic learning process that could be incorporated into formal learning environments. With a paucity of existing empirical work of geographically distributed co-design with children, our case study provides an empirical foundation pointing at critical issues to be further investigated such as multilingual design, social cohesion, facilitation roles, technologies, design breadcrumbs, negotiations and learner’s pride.