The Metaverse ready for Education?
As the hype around the metaverse truly kicked in with the announcement of Facebook changing their name to Meta, businesses, and schools started to finally open up their eyes to really look into it. While on average students spend 20–90 minutes on each social media app on a daily basis, education is leveraging more and more ‘’social apps’’ like teams, zoom, gather.town, Minecraft for Education — tools for making their lessons more interactive and remotely accessible at any place and any time.
The Impact of COVID-19 on Education
Due to COVID-19 and the forced closedown of all schools in the period of March 2020 and at least September 2021, our teachers had to quickly adapt to getting some remote teaching practices. This encouraged them to figure out which platforms were able to accommodate work forms that were normally done inside the classroom. Today we call the selection of ICT tools and work forms that are facilitated over electronic devices to facilitate the learners' process Blended Learning. New (support) roles made available at that time are called ICT and Education coaches.
From using only mail and LMS systems like Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, or Brigthspace to communicate about homework & to deliver study work.
The Adoption of Blended Learning
The MOOC era finally kicked in and platforms like LessonUp started seeing Primary, secondary, vocational, and higher universities quickly share over 1.4 million lessons with teachers from other schools and layers. Democratization was born in the old-fashioned study material, like PowerPoint of lessons, that were kept private or barely reviewed by other teachers.
Something else happened as well, traditional lectures (directly translated: Hearing colleges) were no longer done in lecture halls, as Teams/Zoom/Webex could accommodate 100 persons and additional tools for quizzes, peer2peer feedback & other brainstorming tools like Mural emerged so students could actually individually interact with study materials during the lecture when done over a computer. In our school, those lecture halls were upcycled into massive greenscreen studios as teachers began to understand how to blend their education better to get higher study results.
The pandemic actually was able to get student grades up in a lot of schools, as reviewing teaching material became possible, recordings were done & you could study effectively everywhere in a quiet place.
Classes became more interactive so more and more cones of the learning pyramid below were offered to the students to choose from themselves.
Now post-covid, we have a world in which 97% of schools went online & in which many see the amount of Edtech in their classroom go 10x — in our University alone over 500 tools are used. Of which of course not all are mandatory, functional, or used more than one time for evaluation. Avans University of Applied Sciences started sharing articles about many of those tools and their benefit for teachers to use with an example or a link to a teacher who can give them tips and tricks.
The Metaverse in Education and Beyond
With all these trends occurring, also schools started trying out Metaverse platforms, whether you name it MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) or Socially enabled game. The Metaverse makes up a multibillion-dollar industry just based on the spending on MMORPGs each year. Platforms like META and Microsoft start spending 10+ Billion USD into making their RealityLabs/ Activision Blizzard Game departments ready for the next step in which the internet becomes Web3 & all activities we used to do in real-life become enabled over a VR headset like the Quest 2, Varjo XR-3/Quest Pro or the Hololens 2. With 171 million people worldwide using VR in some form today, and 10 universities having their own Metaversity over 3 million students today receive their education in 3D platforms like Labster, EngageVR, Virbela, CoSpaces, Altspace, 3DL, and other platforms. Let’s list the headsets and their use case.
That means that once people have had another year of lockdown, sooner than later metaverses could become a new standard of browsing now that 4G- 5G is rolled out in most of today’s urban areas.
The high production costs, the current focus of XR on entertainment and sports, and the limited availability of educational content in marketplaces like STEAM, Oculus Store, and Viveport, have created a need for a marketplace for the special requirements of buyers of educational XR content. New platforms have emerged, but they often only focus on niche areas or are not representative of the full range of educational content used in schools.
It is estimated that 10,000 new educational content games are added to the Steam store every year, which presents a significant challenge in terms of labeling and curating to make them accessible to all levels of education (primary, secondary, vocational, and higher education) and compatible with the various headsets used in schools.
To improve access to the educational content available in the Metaverse for schools, it is important to bring all of this content together and make it accessible. Teachers can get started by getting in touch with XR4work — we can help you navigate this new landscape.
