Transformative Strategies in Landscape Education: Utilizing Extended Reality Technologies to Enhance Learning Experience

This dissertation investigates how extended-reality (XR) technologies can advance landscape-architecture education by combining a systematic evidence map with sequential empirical studies. A scoping review of 75 peer-reviewed publications (2004 – 2024) delineates nine dominant research themes—interaction design, technological integration, learning outcomes, curriculum frameworks, participation, game-based learning, site-specific design, and adoption barriers and opportunities—while identifying recurrent impediments related to hardware cost, interoperability, and cognitive overload. Guided by these gaps, four mixed-methods investigations probe XR effectiveness across scales and contexts: a participatory virtual-reality module that engages students in co-creating a virtual construction gallery; a controlled VR experiment on brick-bond learning that captures spatial comprehension, self-efficacy, and usability metrics over two academic years; a geolocated augmented-reality field study that tests XR’s capacity to enrich site-parameter interpretation during in-situ visits; and a geospatial SDK powered VR experiment aiming to understand the implications of XR in remote site understanding. Across these studies, XR implementation produced statistically and practically significant results in spatial reasoning, confidence, and learner engagement. The studies also delineated several difficulties for using XR in landscape architecture academic setting such as navigation complexity, visual fatigue, and institutional resource constraints. Synthesizing quantitative and qualitative results, the dissertation proposes an implementation framework that aligns XR tools with curricular aims, accessibility requirements, and ecological-literacy objectives, advocating hybrid integration rather than substitution of traditional pedagogies. Collectively, the research delivers an evidence-based roadmap for equitable, scalable, and pedagogically robust adoption of XR in landscape-architecture curricula, while charting future inquiry into biometric feedback, multi-user collaboration, and open-source XR–GIS pipelines.