Doctoral Colloquium—The Potential of Mixed-Reality Technology for Motivating Dentistry Students in Higher Education

New technologies are becoming an essential part of education. Advances in these technologies are changing traditional learning processes, thus affecting students’ motivation and strongly influencing their learning outcomes. Mixed reality (MR) is one of the emerging technologies that may affect students’ learning motivation, with the potential to improve their performance and enhance learning outcomes. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how MR affects students’ motivation to learn. Thus, the aim of this doctoral colloquium is to propose how research may be conducted to evaluate the efficacy and potential of MR technology for motivating dentistry students in higher education. In this research, we design and develop a gamified educational MR application by combining the (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) ADDIE instructional design framework with the (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) ARCS model for motivational design that is integrated with gamification components, called the ARCS+G model. The MR application is to be used by dentistry students at Umm Al-Qura University in a fundamental implantology course to train them on pre-operative planning using dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). In this setting, we will investigate students’ pretest and posttest learning motivation with the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS).