Virtual technologies in education: Problems of legal regulation

Introduction. The relevance of the article is due to the problems of the regulatory and legal substantiation of the use of virtual technologies in education, which consists in the lack of legal criteria for the introduction of immersive technologies in the educational space. Currently, despite the intensive development of digital technologies, including immersive, domestic education lacks actual regulations that would regulate the use of virtual reality (VR) / augmented reality (AR) technologies in the educational process.

Purpose setting. It is becoming relevant to conduct a comparative legal analysis of scientific publications in the legal and pedagogical areas on the regulatory and legal support of virtual VR and AR technologies, to study the regulatory framework of Russian legislation governing the use of VR and AR technologies in education, to identify common regulatory and legal problems for educational organizations of all levels.

Methodology and methods of the study. The study includes a review of bibliographic and regulatory sources on the problems of legal justification for the use of virtual technologies in education, a structural analysis of local legal acts, generalization and synthesis of research results. The article talks about the need to have a clear regulatory framework for their use in the educational process, the development of mechanisms and regulations for assessing the safety of the use of technologies, the compliance of the content with the educational goals, and the streamlining of the conceptual apparatus.

Results. The results include a generalization of the main legal problems that complicate the implementation of immersive/virtual technologies in the educational process.

Conclusion. It has been revealed that the problems of legal regulation of the use of virtual technologies are of a common nature for educational organizations of all levels; the issues of legal justification for the use of virtual technologies in local regulations, the creators of which are each educational organization, have not been sufficiently resolved; the very construction of the concept «virtual technologies» is not presented definitively in regulatory legal acts, which allows the use of broader terms «immersive technologies», «immersion technologies, etc.; the need to develop requirements for new competencies of teachers has been identified; regulatory and legal regulation of the process of introducing VR/AR technologies within the educational process as an educational method is required.

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