Evolution of teaching roles and tasks in VR / AR-based education

In recent years the strong potential behind VR and AR technologies in supporting education has become increasingly clear. From an educational perspective, an important benefit brought about by such technologies is that they lead to a teaching environment that is first and foremost learner centered. This encourages the application of innovative educational methods and introduces new modes of teaching into the learning experience. However, all of this makes it necessary for teachers to spend more time preparing for their classes, as well as growing acquainted with the latest technologies - in short, it is a process that requires improved digital literacy on the teachers' part.This paper presents an experiment contrasting traditional 2D interfaces and the MaxWhere 3D VR educational platform in order to shed light on how these technologies influence the effectiveness of various operations and workflows constituting teachers' tasks. In the experiment, the same workflow is compared when executed using e-mail attachments, a classical 2D e-learning platform and MaxWhere's 3D platform.The results of the experiment, evaluated in terms of a newly proposed (and clearly motivated) framework, point to the conclusion that when using MaxWhere instead of traditional 2D interfaces, teachers, lecturers and trainers are able to accomplish the same digital workflows with 37-64% less user operations, and up to 72% less machine operations. Based on these results, the paper concludes that MaxWhere as an educational platform offers users - not only students, but the lecturers, teachers and trainers too- a number of ways to accomplish tasks that would otherwise require extremely complicated digital workflows in more traditional 2D environments.