The impact of the metaverse on education
Until now, the conversation that dominates about the metaverse has to do, above all, with its applications in the world of social networks, how it will affect the entertainment industry and, of course, the volume of business it will generate. However, another debate that is growing in importance is the impact it will have on the educational field. This will be the focus of our article today.
The Classlife website provides us with one of the first clues about the possible applications of the metaverse. “An educational center can create a campus or a replica of its institution in a virtual version. With its classrooms, dining rooms, teachers’ rooms… In this way, students, teachers, and the rest of the center’s workers will be able to communicate and interact in an agile way, as if they were there in person, also through video calls or video conferences. Something perfect for institutions that are based on e-learning and offer all their training online, as it will allow them to humanize the educational experience, even if it sounds contradictory in nature”.
The landing of education in the metaverse was precisely one of the most outstanding themes of Mobile World Congress of 2022, held in Barcelona. Pablo G. Bejerano covered it for El País and wrote these revealing lines. “One of the demonstrations in the Ericsson pavilion looks towards the year 2026, for which it foresees immersive lessons at the university. The scenario he proposes is the following: in a classroom all the students wear extended reality glasses and the teacher, who is currently traveling on a train, can give the class as if she were present. She appears as a hologram and the students also have the subject under study in the background”. Fascinating, right?
The same idea is developed by the blog Sapos y Princesas of the newspaper El Mundo, when it refers to the use of the metaverse in education in these terms. “It will facilitate the integration within the educational experience of practices in virtual environments in which students 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 the performance of virtual surgical interventions”. It remains to be seen if these hypotheses will come true or not…