Equity and Scale: XR and Real-Time 3D Tech’s Role in Education and Workforce

Executive Summary

At Jobs for the Future (JFF), we’ve seen firsthand how technology enables economic advancement. We believe that extended reality (XR) and real-time 3D (RT3D) technology will play an essential role in helping learners and workers better prepare for quality jobs, driving the creation of more quality jobs, and enhancing the quality of existing jobs, all necessary components of reaching JFF’s North Star goal. However, two significant adoption challenges stand in the way of making this future a reality: equity, ensuring that all voices are represented in XR and RT3D products and are empowered to use them, and scale, the ability to implement this technology in every classroom or workplace. Both challenges must be addressed before the true impact of this technology in education, workforce development, and the workplace can be fulfilled.

To understand how XR and RT3D technologies are reshaping how we learn, work, and hold jobs, focusing on equity and scale, we asked four questions of the Metaverse for All Innovation Circle, a group of education and workforce development practitioners, entrepreneurs, XR, and RT3D thought leaders that JFF convened with the support from Unity’s Social Impact team:

• How can we ensure that the skills required to design, build, deploy, and maintain XR and RT3D solutions and content are distributed equitably?
• How can we ensure that incorporating the lived experiences of people facing barriers to economic advancement is standard industry practice in the development and deployment of XR, RT3D, and related technologies?
• How can we empower organizations to adopt XR and RT3D solutions?
• How can we ensure XR and RT3D technologies enable worker and learner opportunities and don’t perpetuate existing inequality in our employment and education systems?

After diving into these questions with the Innovation Circle, we developed this impact agenda to outline three principles for how the XR and RT3D ecosystems can both slow down to prioritize equity and speed up to scale:

1. Closing the gap between creators, consumers, and beneficiaries
2. Achieving buy-in around a shared vision that aligns and motivates all stakeholders
3. Creating incentives for success

Achieving both equity and scale requires an ecosystem-level approach, as individual companies face numerous trade-offs, such as cost and time to market. Below, we explore the three principles in our impact agenda and provide recommendations for building a truly equitable and scalable metaverse for all. Some recommendations are new, others adapt successful practices from different XR and RT3D industry sectors for education and workforce development, and some have already been well-tested.

Closing the Gap Between Creators, Consumers, and Beneficiaries

In the design of any product, there’s no substitute for deep, firsthand knowledge of dynamics on the ground, such as the state of a classroom or the demands of a small business. Engaging learners, educators, small business owners, and end users in the product design and content creation process from the earliest stages—beginning with needs assessment and ideation and continuing through go-to-market strategies and iteration—results in stronger applications, many of which may not have been obvious use-cases or markets. This model has already been recognized in other parts of the digital economy, from social media to footwear, where consumers use technology to create and customize their experience. This approach would change the XR and RT3D supply chain to an ecosystem where many stakeholders, including end-users or customers, hold different parts of the product creation process and cycle.

Many examples of this model are applied in education and workforce development, but these examples are often at specific points of a product’s lifecycle, such as co-designing learning modules, and not carried throughout. Commitment to inclusive design will benefit both users and developers of XR and RT3D technologies as previously unimagined ideas take flight.

Recommendations:

• Integrate XR and RT3D technology development and related skills into education at all levels. Many K-12 and postsecondary programs support students using technology, but there are fewer positions for students to create technology. Equipping classrooms with ways to teach technical XR and RT3D development skills (such as Unity platforms or Meta Spark), design thinking, durable skills such as collaboration and interpersonal communications, and entrepreneurship gives students in-demand skills and encourages risk-taking, experimentation, active listening, problem solving, and creativity, as JFF saw firsthand in our Skill Immersion Lab. This model has been successful with other technologies in education environments, such as robotics competitions. Specific approaches include company mentorship programs, student-led hackathons, co-branding products with student leaders, etc.
• Provide more easy-to-use open-source, low-code, or no-code tools to increase access to product creation from more education and workforce customers. These tools are common in gaming but can also extend to the education and workforce fields. New technologies with high learning curves can create more friction and barriers for teachers, instructors, or students when they interrupt existing workflows. Professional development and technical support are important and necessary, but more elements are needed to lower barriers to entry. Students, workers, teachers, and managers alike need tools that are truly easy for novices and integrate seamlessly with existing ways of working and learning. This could also develop extensive open-source libraries of XR and RT3D assets, tools, and codebases, enabling customers and creators to build upon existing work and apply to their unique use case more rapidly, with a faster learning curve and less cost.
• Technology companies must commit to inclusive product design principles when building XR and RT3D tools. Beyond adhering to a set of principles, this could include technology companies investing in ongoing community co-design processes and various stages of product development and community leaders helping to organize and train their members on design principles to reduce the learning curve and increase value.
• Test business models that allow creators, whether individuals or organizations, to monetize their content. Roblox’s creator-focused platform is one example. Many technology companies in the XR and RT3D space already operate creator platforms or multisided marketplaces that support developers.

Achieving Buy-In Around a Shared Vision That Aligns and Motivates All Stakeholders

Defining a vision for the metaverse is challenging because it is as expansive as the world itself—it could encompass anything. Developing a clear, shared vision for success across industries (technology companies, solution providers) and within the communities (schools, community colleges, employers, training providers) that use the technology can achieve sustainable adoption and affect people’s lives.

Recommendations:

• Understand the current landscape. Developing a vision requires an understanding of the current state of play. A landscape scan is necessary to grasp where XR and RT3D currently have the most significant impact as a new way to learn and train. This includes its applications in K-12 education, postsecondary systems, and workforce training. It’s also important to identify where the use of XR and RT3D contributes the most to learning outcomes, the characteristics of successful adopters, the most successful use-cases in education and workforce development, and the barriers preventing widespread adoption of these tools.
• Measure our shared values. There’s not always clear alignment across technology companies, educators, policymakers, and researchers on how to measure the impact of XR and RT3D on our education and workforce systems. Agreeing on key measures of success will help technology developers build the right features into their products, educators to benchmark performance of those tools, and researchers and policymakers to study and make recommendations around system-level outcomes. A co-sponsored summit or working group between technology companies, academia, employers, workforce development, and others could tackle this collective action problem together.
• Develop a shared community vision for how these tools will provide positive change. The first step in conversations around new technology integrations shouldn’t be about technology or procurement. It should be about a broad vision for the future of that organization or community. Everyone should be included in these visioning conversations, including administrative staff members, faculty, learners, parents, employers, and beyond. Digital Promise has developed a guide for inclusive innovation that focuses on engagement and buy-in and can be used to guide how a community shapes technology engagements and innovation with a focus on equity and sustainability.

Creating Incentives for Success

Providing incentives for key stakeholders with diverse and possibly conflicting motivations to come together can help achieve collective action. Whether they are technology companies, employers, school districts, or learners and educators themselves, stakeholders play distinct roles in realizing a common vision.

Recommendations:

• Make diversity and accessibility a requirement throughout the supply chain. School districts, community colleges, and workforce development organizations must include diversity and accessibility criteria in their product and purchasing requirements. This process necessitates inclusive bidding and selection processes from start to finish, requiring extensive outreach to potential bidders who may meet those requirements and a review committee fully representing the students or faculty who will be the technology’s end-users. Philanthropic and government grant-makers can also include similar language in their funding opportunities as additional levers to encourage a more diverse and accessible XR and RT3D supply chain; see Unity for Humanity’s application scoring criteria for an example.
• Develop industry-approved XR-friendly standards for professional certifications. Industry associations or other institutions governing professional certifications or validating skills should work with employers, workers, solution providers, and technology companies to ensure XR and RT3D training aligns with current needs and standards and give their “stamp of approval.” For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a virtual “OneLab” where laboratory professionals can engage in professional development. Employers, especially for early and late majority adopters, could feel confident these tools are proven in their industry.
• Investors should commit to incorporating inclusive design standards and metrics into their investment decisions. Startups in the metaverse space, particularly those serving workers and learners, will benefit from commitments to inclusive design practices. Such commitments will also expand the market and improve XR and RT3D tools for a more diverse audience. Investors should consider betting on companies in the XR and RT3D space that focus on inclusive design as a feature of their products, understanding that those companies will have a higher chance of identifying new customers and use cases beyond what currently exists in the market. (See the fifth recommendation in “Creating Conditions for Young Adults To Thrive@Work” for further details on social impact investor metrics.)
• Increase investment and support for Black and Latine product developers and entrepreneurs. These startup founders received just 1% and 1.5%, respectively, of all venture capital funding in the United States in 2022. Many potential entrepreneurs lack access to the financial resources needed to build and scale a company. This limited representation becomes apparent with the rollout of products that only connect with some customers’ lived experiences, limiting adoption and potential impact, lived experiences, limiting adoption and potential impact. 

Unlocking the power of the metaverse—a truly equitable, scaled reality—relies on building systems of deep partnership and collaboration between technology companies, learners, workers, educators, and instructors and the communities that surround them: parents, government, employers, philanthropy, community-based organizations, and others. Achieving this requires a strong commitment to inclusive design and co-creation throughout product development and user experience.

Learn More

Do you have insights to share about how XR and RT3D technologies can be scaled to benefit all learners and workers? We’d love to hear from you—contact us today or visit www.jff.org/xr to learn more about this work.