We have published a news article Times Higher Education , Should we be worried? An educators’ introduction to the metaverse that provides a guide to the metaverse for education. What is it and what might it mean for the future of education? There is now a version on the Jisc website of An educators’ guide to the metaverse if you can’t access the THE version. We’d welcome your thoughts and to hear more about what you are doing around immersive learning, email innovation@jisc.ac.uk.
The work of my team involves us looking for future challenges and problems faced by the sector. We then look for the steps that might be taken to address these future challenges. One such use case we are interesting in exploring is the scaling of education to address a predicted growth in both global learning and also reskilling for industry 4.0.
Over the summer we did a short 2-week research sprint to get a feel for the current reality of the metaverse for education. We spoke to some people who had experience of immersive learning to get their opinion. My conclusion was that the reality of the metaverse is a few years away and there are some major challenges we covered in the article.
To be more positive, there is some great innovation happening around immersive learning. This work provides important steps towards the future opportunities of the metaverse in education.
Here are a few examples from the many we are learning about.
Kathryn Woodhead in Jisc works with the Wales Extended Reality (XR) community that hosts termly meet-ups where community members share the projects they have been working on. In previous meetings, Coleg y Cymoedd shared their practical applications of AR and VR across the college, and Gower College Swansea shared how VR had transformed their open evenings. If you are based in Wales and interested in joining the community, please contact your relationship manager for more information.
Jisc has partnered with Metaverse Learning to improve access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) teaching and assessments. Read more about the Jisc and Metaverse Learning partnership boosts access to AR and VR learning resources. Coleg Cambria have incorporated content from Metaverse Learning across their Health and Social Care Curriculum to support learners on physical placements.
The National Centre for AI in Education have been piloting Body Swaps. Bodyswaps use VR and AI to empower learners to practise and develop their soft skills through empathy and self-reflection.
We are interested to hear from institutions using immersive technologies for leaning like the Queen Mary University London who are teaching medical using a real-life simulate medical procedure in VR using technology to train the doctors and surgeons of tomorrow https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2022/pr/queen-mary-students-receive-first-lecture-in-the-metaverse.html
Do share what how you are preparing for the metaverse. What are your challenges or experiences? Contact us at innovation@jisc.ac.uk
