How will the Metaverse change virtual education?
How will the Metaverse change virtual education?
November began with big news — Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebranding of Facebook. The company will now be called Meta and will focus on developing the metaverse. Why the concept of vr educational platform is becoming our new reality and how this will affect the education sector, explains the CEO of the EdTech and HRTech startup, MOST Technology.
What is the Metaverse and why do we need it?
Zuckerberg borrowed the name and concept of the metaverse from the cult sci-fi novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. The book is a dystopia about the distant world of the future, where people have almost completely moved into virtual reality. In the ordinary world, the main character works as a courier and delivers pizza, and his virtual avatar is a famous hacker and fearless samurai. The context is important, because this is the main feature of the concept of a digital world — here you can be whoever you want and break the usual boundaries.
That’s exactly where Zuckerberg wants to come with the virtual education metaverse. In fact, the metaverse is the next stage in the evolution of social networks, a developed virtual reality built on the basis of VR and AR technologies.
As a result, we will get a world in which you can:
Already, Meta is developing a headset, glasses and augmented reality helmet. More than $10 billion was allocated for the rebranding and 10,000 people were hired on the team. This is no longer a distant fantastic future, this is our present.
How does the development of the Metaverse affect education
As the founder of an international business school, I see this change with both excitement and anxiety. In my opinion, the Metaverse will provide tremendous opportunities for education. The dream of many — to study, for example, at Stanford, Columbia University or any other prestigious university in the world — will become even more real.
At the same time, I understand that huge problems await us. Over the past two years, we’ve seen an almost violent shift in education from offline to online, and we’ve seen people resist. This is normal, any transformation is painful. Once upon a time, it was also difficult for us to switch from push-button phones to touch-sensitive phones. And now we no longer remember what it is like to press and miss buttons. I love watching how people fluently type messages with both hands, although I myself still use one.
Of course, we have gained a lot in the world of online learning. For example, we got the opportunity to save time, not commute to classes and communicate with people from all over the world. At the same time, we have completely lost our live communication. Previously, courses for students were not just study, it was real leisure. Drinking coffee with a classmate during a break, and discussing the news is priceless. No meeting on Zoom can replace that, and everyone understands this.
To make up for the losses from the transition to online, the world has focused on improving services. We gained new forms of education (asynchronous and mobile learning, microlearning). Lessons became interactive and focused, personalization appeared. And I think the Metaverse is a logical step in this development.
Now the main task of the Metaverse is to make the virtual value higher than the real one. Of course it scares us. Of course, we look in horror at virtual reality glasses and robots. But I believe that technology will allow us to compensate for the losses from the transition to online and take education to the next level. And we have a lot to learn, otherwise it will simply not be possible to be in demand in our rapidly developing world.
Of course, like the rest of the world, I am worried about this transition to mixed reality for education, and I certainly do not want my digital avatar to live a richer life than I do. But I would like to think that the development of the online education in the Metaverse is an important and necessary step. New technologies will help us tap into our undisclosed brain resources, learn more, and be more capable. And finally, forget about endless frames and borders.