Virtual worlds have been applied in the educational field since the 1990s . Currently, some universities and centers use Second Life to be at the forefront in the world of virtual education.
Now Facebook has given a new impetus to the development of virtual environments with the firm commitment to the metaverse recently announced by Mark Zuckerberg. The guru of social networks has just invested 1,000 million euros in the research and development of it. And the first thing that the most advanced education professionals ask themselves is how this new paradigm is going to be integrated into the field of education.
The coronavirus pandemic has marked a before and after in the application of technology for distance education. And, in many cases, due to a lack of planning, the experience has not been entirely positive. Now the concept of the metaverse enters the scene and opens a new door to the development of digital teaching.
Metaverse is the new buzzword, but understanding its meaning is not easy. Everything “meta” is complicated. We will try to explain it in a simple way.
What is the metaverse?
The metaverse is the interaction that arises from the contact between different virtual universes. For example, all young people regularly interact in various virtual worlds: in social networks , in online video games such as Fortnite or Minecraft , or in the Second Life Learning educational platform , among others. Each of them are more or less complex universes in which they have an academic and social life , different avatars, a history of activities and experiences, objects and trophies won or bought with real or virtual money, etc.
With the emergence of multiple virtual environments, a massive parallel universe has already been created in which the diversity of platforms progressively increases the fragmentation of experiences. And this is the gap that the metaverse fills : the transfer of life and registration of users between different platforms and universes, both virtual and real.
For example, providing the ability to easily transfer data from one fitness tracking application to another, thereby retaining our records or records.
The Blockchain revolution , also in education
For this , it will be necessary to advance a lot in the standardization of communication protocols between universes and in the development of trusted block chain technology ( Blockchain ) , the same technology that makes transactions with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies possible . With it, it is possible to carry out secure transactions in one environment and ensure that the object or service purchased also exists in others.
Facebook wants to change the functionality of its main website and become more and more a virtual environment (VR) that allows interaction between different universes . Although the project is intended primarily for personal and business relationships, Zuckerberg has already focused on its educational application. The Meta Immersive Learning initiative wants to improve its training content in three fundamental aspects:
- Giving tools and training to the creators of this type of content
- Investigating new models of immersive learning
- Supporting the design of cheaper devices with more features
How does this benefit education?
Since the invention of VRML ( Virtual Reality Modeling Language ) in 1994, virtual worlds in three-dimensional environments have been used to improve learning.
Currently, all teachers and students use various digital tools in their daily lives: for online classes, to share materials or to take tests, among other activities. In some cases, advanced solutions are already being used, such as the use of augmented reality in the face-to-face classroom, which allows students to access virtual content during class through augmented reality glasses. For example, visiting the interior of a historical space in an art history class.
This diversity of technologies presents a practical problem. They are often incompatible tools with each other, which makes it difficult to transfer content and data quickly.
The metaverse will facilitate the integration within the educational experience of practices in virtual environments in which student and teacher can interact as in a face-to-face classroom. This application of virtual reality is already being used successfully in the teaching of health sciences, for example in performing virtual surgeries.
In any field, this will allow progress in new teaching models that follow the philosophy of “learning by doing”, much more useful and motivating for the student.
The union of virtual reality, the metaverse and artificial intelligence will allow the content to be personalized for each student and will make monitoring and evaluation easier for the teacher.
Everything indicates that the metaverse is going to give an important boost to the integration of new technologies within the educational field . One more step in the great revolution that is online training and that it is no longer possible to ignore.