Virtual reality has emerged as an influential technology in the educational landscape, offering learners and teachers immersive and interactive experiences that enhance traditional teaching methods. However, despite the increasing importance of virtual reality in education, a systematic description and classification of virtual reality use cases in education is still lacking. This limits the understanding and comparability of virtual reality use cases and highlights the need for a structured approach. This study asks the research question: How can virtual reality educational use cases, identified in the literature, be described, and classified? To classify these use cases, this study develops a state-of-the-art taxonomy. The taxonomy was developed in a combination of a conceptual-to-empirical and empirical-to-conceptual approach. The first stage to develop the taxonomy was based on a conceptual-to-empirical approach. Here, the concepts of virtual reality, use case and education serve as meta-characteristics and theoretical structure. To further detail the dimensions and characteristics, a systematic literature review was conducted by following a PRISMA-guided search and selection process. Therefore, the scientific databases Science Direct, AISel and Springer Link were used to search for studies between 2018 and 2023, obtaining a sample of 39 publications. As the conceptual-to-empirical approach did not richly describe the analysed virtual reality use cases from the studies, additional dimensions and characteristics were identified inductively. Therefore, a second iteration was conducted relating to the empirical-to-conceptual approach. This process explored the practical aspects of virtual reality scenarios and added applicable and practical characteristics to the initial theoretical foundation. The result is a comprehensive taxonomy of virtual reality use cases in education that contributes significantly to existing knowledge and provides a solid foundation for future research. The final taxonomy includes 17 dimensions and 37 characteristics. These findings can support educators to understand the nature of virtual reality use cases, enabling them to describe and implement such use cases effectively within educational settings. [Note: The publication year (2023) shown in the citation on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year is 2024.]