The Past, the Present, and the Future of the Evolution of Mixed Reality in Teacher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study presented in this manuscript has a current and pertinent focus with regard to the concerns with the use of AI, specifically its impact and effective use in several fields of society, particularly in education.

The document is well organized and written in a clear and comprehensive way.

The following comments and suggestions intend to help improve the quality of the paper and are organized concerning its’ different sections:

- To be complete, the abstract should identify the problem/objective of the study and make reference to the methodological options. 

- Introduction:

            Considering that MR is a central concept of the study I suggest that the authors make clear why they choose to present Microsoft’s definition.

- Theoretical framework:

            It’s important to clarify the criteria used to generate the simulations/scenarios for teacher education. Which characteristics should they present? Do they evidence an exploratory or traditional teaching and learning environment?

            The authors state the concerns with the teachers’ pedagogical skills. Shouldn’t content knowledge be important either? If this is not considered, the manuscript should include some explanation for this exclusion.

- Methodology:

I recommend that the title of the section “Systematic literature review on the use of mixed reality in teacher education” be replaced by Method.

This section should clearly present all the methodological options and the literature that grounds them. Taking the goal (research question) into consideration what is the methodology and the method used? Why did the authors privileged the listed databases?

- Results:

            Subsections 5.1-6.4 should be included in a Results’ section. Also, these subsections should have a closer relation to the research questions.

            I suggest that the author reduce the size of the table (maybe using a smaller space throughout the lines). I recommend the use of “Participants” instead of “Population”. 

- Discussion

            The discussion should be crossed with literature.

Author Response

Please find attached the reviewers comments and our response. thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article provides an interesting overview of the development and benefits of MR-related software, as well as presenting some possible ways of developing AI-generated simulations in the future. 

However, the article seems more like a alleged “state-of-the-art”-report of milestones and affordances having been reached and accomplished by R&D in their own institution than a research paper that investigates MR-related software on a more general and conceptual basis, thus leaving an impression of being an internal report, rather than an academic article. 

The article would benefit from a more specific conceptualization of “Mixed Reality” than simply referring to Microsoft´s own definition. This, as the concepts of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) easily get blurred and intertwined, even in research articles. This is especially important, given the fact that Microsoft´s own MR-Google does not resemble the virtual functions, nor the interactivity, of the TeachLivE-software. Based on this, the choice of criteria used for the systematic analysis of research literature, could be refuted, as the concept of “Mixed Reality” often refers to other software functions than the ones central in the TeachLivE-program. 

There is a huge discrepancy in the article when it comes to its actual research findings and the final discussions. Whereas the findings to a large degree show positive learning outcomes of the past, or current, versions of MR-based teaching resources, the following paragraphs outline the possible, and futuristic, potentialities of AI-generated virtual simulations, but without integrating the actual findings in these discussions. Thereby the findings remain undiscussed, at the expense of a more generic overview of the potentialities of futuristic, and AI-generated, virtual learning environments. 

There are spelling mistakes or language issues in line 22, 74, 101, 261, 279, 282, 337 and 448.

Author Response

Please find attached the reviewers comments and our response. thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors attended all the comments and suggestions.

Author Response

Thank you and we did one last revision for the other reviewer. Appreciate the feedback. 

Reviewer 2 Report

There has been made satisfactory changes in the texts when it comes to describing the research method and intertwining the findings with a futuristic outlook on the use of AI. Yet, the definition of MR, copy-pasted from Microsoft, does not cover the scope of this research area in a proper way as Microsoft's XR-Google utilizes a Head Mounted Display to show "a blend of physical and digital worlds" whereas the hardware developed by this organization uses screen-based equipment to display a virtual world. These is a mass of research coming down to differences in perceived usefulness, learning outcomes and motivational issues when the use of immersive virtual realities (IVR) is used vs. more traditional, screen-based and 2D-driven virtual environments. The article should address this research and preferably come up with a definition of MR that suits these projects better. 

Author Response

Thank you for your great feedback and further suggestions about the definition of MR. We decided to in this revision to replace the definition with our evolution of the use of MR with a new reference citation.  We appreciate the feedback.