<p>The shift towards Industry 4.0 has exerted great financial and technical pressure on skilled workforce training because of a significant increase in the complexity of automation, information, and system integration. This resource-demanding trend creates a systematic barrier for education inequity in small-to-medium engineering schools. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic also highlights the challenges in offering experiential learning due to limited access to physical labs. To overcome such barriers, a promising pathway towards accessible and immersive manufacturing education is the integrated cloud-based digital twin (CBDT) and virtual reality (VR) technologies. The CBDT helps to build a digital twin (DT) that creates an up-to-date digital copy of the physical labs or systems using cloud infrastructure and WebGL, while the VR helps to create an immersive and interactive environment for enhanced learning outcomes. This paper introduces a general accessible and immersive manufacturing education (AIME) framework that features CBDT, VR, various learning modes, and personalized learning concepts. Then, an AIME framework-based prototype system was partially implemented as a testbed for learning efficacy evaluation. A comprehensive user study was conducted with the segregation of volunteers into three distinct experimental environments: in-person labs, asynchronized labs, and live interactive DT labs. The findings underscore the effectiveness of these live interactive DT labs in enhancing the learning outcome of users, increasing their ability to comprehend complex manufacturing processes, and improving troubleshooting abilities. Some limitations and future work directions are further discussed at the end.</p>