Metaverse In Education

By Clement Abai and Olaitan Kushimo

Background

My obsession of merging real and virtual worlds has been a fun experience so far in my doctoral studies. This can be seen through one of my recent projects (Figure. 1) that I am currently working on. This project allows me to be creative and explore the potential use of emerging technology in learning such as the Mozilla Hubs, a Virtual Reality (VR) platform developed by Mozilla. In this project, I took the lead in designing virtual learning spaces to engage learners in their learning process. For example, the Virtual Citizen Science Expo (VCSE). This virtual learning space was designed to engage youth in learning about drought, water and environmental monitoring. Learners enter VCSE as avatars and interact in real time in this space. This merging of the real world situation with the virtual world is known as Metaverse. In simple terms, the Metaverse is seen as a virtual space with graphic features where people can do things as they do in real life like shop, play or work. Just as in virtual reality, the headset immerses you into the 3D-environment while carrying the motion-sensor controllers to interact with virtual objects, the microphone allows for communicating with others.

Industries and social media platforms such as Meta (previously known as Facebook) are broadening their horizons by merging the real and virtual worlds, which has further driven exploration of this technology in educational settings. Graduate Research Associates (GRA), Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA) and researchers in educational research who are interested in these emerging technologies are exploring  the impact of Extended Reality (XR) on learning and are excited about this phenomenon. XR refers to emerging technologies ranging from Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR) and other future immersive technologies (Palmas & Klinker, 2020). Not only are the GRA’s, GTA’s and the educational researchers excited about this new development, this also ignited their curiosity about the opportunities this technology brings and how it can be applied in education. One of these GTA’s whom the idea sparked their interest happens to be my colleague, Olaitan Kushimo, a PhD student in the Learning, Design and Technology program who also works in the Emerging Technology and Creativity Research Lab at Oklahoma State University. She recently voiced her interest in a recent lab meeting about the use of Metaverse in education and since this was in line with my interest, we decided to collaborate and work together to explore how Metaverse could be used in education. 

Figure 1. Participants as avatars gathering in a virtual learning space and watching an instructional video on how to measure and report rainfall.

Potential of Metaverse in Learning

Metaverse, considered to be the next-generation Internet, is a virtual world where users can interact with each other and objects in real time as avatars. This term became a hot topic when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in October. 28, 2021 announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta, to include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the Oculus VR under this new brand. By changing the name to Meta, the aim was to focus on the Metaverse, a shared virtual environment, as well as its other popular apps (CBC, 2022). This merging of the virtual world and the real world creates work experiences that are immersive and realistic that anyone can perform (Ng et al, 2021). For example, a study by Siyaev and Jo (2021) on aircraft maintenance showed that Metaverse creates opportunities to interact with virtual airplanes and provides an almost realistic work experience for the aircraft maintenance workers. A separate study by Barry et. al., (2015) on active learning and Metaverse discovered that in a virtual problem-based learning (PBL) class, an eye blinking system was used to find how emotional responses of students correlated to students blinking their eyes when different mathematical problems were asked in an immersive learning space. The study found that students’ eyes were blinking more when the questions asked were more difficult. It is exciting to see the potential of the Metaverse to provide learning environments that provide a realistic experience, allow interactions and even trigger emotions. Studies such as these leave Olaitan and I optimistic about the potential learning tool the Metaverse may be in a classroom setting. 

Figure 2. Maintenance education of landing gear removal of Boeing 737 using Mixed Reality. Spectator View was used on secondary devices to view the HoloLens experiences (Siyaev & Jo, 2021).

Metaverse in Classrooms

If you have used any of the realities in the XR spectrum in your classroom, then you have experienced some form of Metaverse environment. Metaverse is not new, this technology has been existing since the 1990’s. However, with the advancement of technology, Metaverse is now a major buzzword in the fields of technology, business, finance, and now education  (Welsh, 2022). With the interest in Metaverse in education and hardship caused by the recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemics, teachers and students experienced educational disruptions that led to an even bigger digital divide (Kwang, 2021). A study by MacCallum and Parsons (2019) found that teachers of all levels of experience need to be properly equipped on how to use Metaverse to help students learn. By gaining the necessary skills, teachers can fully realize the educational potential of Metaverse in their practice. This learning environment provides the ability to be more inclusive and create pedagogical solutions in a classroom setting (Kwang, 2021). For example, teachers can integrate games such as a scavenger hunt and puzzles in their virtual learning environment where students can enter as avatars to play the games, work together to solve problems, watch educational videos and hold discussions. By participating and interacting in this virtual learning environment, students and teachers can enjoy the almost realistic experiences in their learning (Siyaev and Jo, 2021) as they collaborate and problem solve. The abilities for students to collaborate and problem solve in a Metaverse learning environment are inline with studies done by  Barry et al., (2015) and Van der Land et. al., (2011). These studies found that Metaverse online learning environments promote group collaboration (Van der Land et. al., 2011) and encourage problem solving (Barry et al., 2015). Finally, Metaverse can empower students to be creative (Tonéis, 2011) by allowing them to choose their own adventure style stories, do presentations in this virtual space, create professional development experiences that will have teachers thinking like kids again. 🙂

Figure 3. Students using VR headsets in a classroom. (Source: The Times of India, 2021).

Figure 4. A student experiencing Metaverse in the background with a VR google . (Source: Chúláin & Reuters, 2022).

References

Agencies. (n.d.). Metaverse: The next net revolution? TIMES NIE : Home. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://toistudent.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/explainer/metaverse-the-next-net-revolution/69198.html.

Barry, D. M., Ogawa, N., Dharmawansa, A., Kanematsu, H., Fukumura, Y., Shirai, T., … & Kobayashi, T. (2015). Evaluation for students’ learning manner using eye blinking system in metaverse. Procedia computer science, 60, 1195-1204.

CBC/Radio Canada. (n.d.). Why Facebook is now called Meta | CBC kids news. CBCnews. Retrieved April 13, 2022, from https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/why-facebook-is-now-called-meta

Chúláin, A. N. (2022, January 14). Are virtual classrooms in the metaverse the future of Education? euronews. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/01/14/educating-in-the-metaverse-are-virtual-reality-classrooms-the-future-of-education.

Kwang Hyung Lee (2021). The educational ‘metaverse’ is coming. THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect. (2021, October 29). Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/educational-metaverse-coming.

MacCallum, K., & Parsons, D. (2019, September). Teacher perspectives on mobile augmented reality: The potential of metaverse for learning. In World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (pp. 21-28).

Ng, W. C., Lim, W. Y. B., Ng, J. S., Xiong, Z., Niyato, D., & Miao, C. (2021). Unified resource allocation framework for the edge intelligence-enabled metaverse. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14325.

Palmas, F., & Klinker, G. (2020). Defining Extended Reality Training: A Long-Term Definition for All Industries. In 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) (pp. 322-324). IEEE.

Siyaev, A., & Jo, G. S. (2021). Towards aircraft maintenance metaverse using speech interactions with virtual objects in mixed reality. Sensors, 21(6), 2066.

Tonéis, C. N. (2011). Puzzles as a creative form of play in metaverse. Journal For Virtual Worlds Research, 4(1).

Van der Land, S., Schouten, A., & Feldberg, F. (2011). Modeling the metaverse: a theoretical model of effective team collaboration in 3D virtual environments. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 4(3).

Welsh, O. (2022, March 6). The metaverse, explained. Polygon. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://www.polygon.com/22959860/metaverse-explained-video-games.