Enhance Your Higher Education Institution by Leveraging a Metaverse

Exploring the metaverse in higher education? This guide to metaverse benefits and key features will help you prepare.

As the world provides more and more digital distractions, higher education institutions are faced with a new challenge. How do you retain students and keep them engaged? 

Online learning is convenient, but it isn't as easy to create the same sense of community digitally as it is in a physical classroom. A metaverse might be just what you are looking for when it comes to increasing student engagement. 

In higher education, a metaverse provides a shared virtual space where students can interact with each other, their instructors, and the digital environment in ways that aren't possible with existing online learning tools or even the real world itself.

Metaverse technologies can help smaller institutions differentiate themselves and provide a learning experience that rivals what larger institutions have to offer.

What is a metaverse?

Gartner says^[1] a metaverse is "the convergence of the virtual and physical worlds. A metaverse is persistent, providing enhanced immersive experiences." You can think of a metaverse as the next evolution of the internet.

It provides an immersive, shared virtual space where students and teachers can experience the world in ways similar to how they experience the real world or in totally new ways not possible in the real world through the use of VR glasses and headsets. 

It can also merge with the real world and augment reality with data, tips, instructions, and other information using AR glasses. And a metaverse is not device-dependent or owned by a single vendor. Anyone with access to it can contribute to helping it grow and evolve.

What are the benefits of leveraging a metaverse in your higher education institution?

Metaverse technologies allow institutions to offer more engaging ways for students to interact with their coursework, peers, and instructors, no matter where they are located or how busy their schedules are. 

Flexible learning

In a metaverse environment, students can learn at their own pace, set their own schedule, and access course materials and assignments when they see fit. When an institution offers virtual classrooms in its metaverse, students can attend lectures and engage with peers and instructors in real time no matter where they are located.

This type of flexibility is what many students look for when they have work or family responsibilities that make it hard for them to attend traditional in-person classes. With a metaverse, these students can balance coursework with outside obligations and still receive a high-quality education.

Content creation

Because a metaverse is not device-dependent or controlled by a single vendor, it allows higher education institutions to create and share educational content at scale. Institutions can work with a variety of vendors to build a large repository of content and courses that multiple instructors can use. Also, instructors can create their own content, build upon the work of other instructors, or add content shared by other institutions to augment coursework.

Metaverse technologies also help institutions keep up with changes in education and technology. As new concepts or technologies come to light, they can use their metaverse to quickly create new educational content to share this knowledge with students, so students always get a cutting-edge educational experience.

Digital twin campus tours

A digital twin is an accurate, virtual model of something that exists in the real world. An institution can create a digital twin of their campus and offer immersive campus tours to prospective students. This type of tour gives prospective students a feel for the campus, facilities, and atmosphere, even when they can visit the physical campus in person due to distance or cost.

Experiential learning

Students don't get much experience with the work they will be doing in real life from a textbook or traditional online learning resources. This is another area where a metaverse can help.

Simulations and lab projects can be generated in a metaverse to replicate what students do in a physical lab. A metaverse can even be used to create scenarios that would be impossible to create in real life. 

For example, biology students can use a metaverse to explore virtual ecosystems and observe species in their natural habitats, and architecture students can design, build, and test structures in a virtual environment.

What are the key features of a higher education metaverse?

Now that we know some of the benefits of implementing a metaverse in a higher education institution, let's take a look at the features that make this possible.

Creator economy and interoperability

These features make a metaverse a highly flexible platform for education. The creator economy means that anyone who has access and the skills can create digital content in the metaverse. Interoperability means that different metaverse platforms can work together, and this digital content can move from one platform to another.

Great things can happen when an educational institution takes advantage of these metaverse features. Content creators will be motivated to create new educational experiences by the revenue they can make, and institutions can share educational content with each other. The end result is a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem of learning resources.

Immersion

The VR technology of the 1990s and early 2000s did not provide much immersion. Virtual objects were blocky and didn't simulate real-world objects very well. Well, things have changed. The high-quality graphics, realistic physics, and intuitive user interfaces in a modern metaverse sometimes make it hard to distinguish VR from reality.

In a higher education metaverse, students can explore, experiment, and learn from the virtual environment in a way that is close to how they would do the same actions in the real world. This immersive environment makes the learning experience more engaging, helps students build more interest in the subjects they are learning, and improves student outcomes.

Interaction (and engagement)

In a higher education metaverse, interaction and engagement are achieved through a combination of social learning features and collaboration tools. This includes everything from virtual whiteboards and chat rooms to video conferencing and shared workspaces, all designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between students and instructors.

By leveraging the interaction and engagement features of a higher education metaverse, institutions can create a more dynamic and participatory learning environment to improve student outcomes. This can include everything from group projects and peer-to-peer learning to interactive lectures and real-time feedback, all designed to help students stay engaged and motivated throughout their academic journey.

Identity

In a higher education metaverse, students can create personalized avatars that represent them in the virtual world. They can change the appearance, clothing, and abilities of these avatars to express their individuality and creativity as well as achieve a sense of ownership and investment in the virtual learning experience.

The identity features of a metaverse make the learning experience more personalized and meaningful for students. Along with customizing avatars, students can tailor their metaverse learning paths, social networks, and career services to meet their unique needs and interests, making the entire experience more relevant and impactful.

Prepare your higher education institution for leveraging a metaverse

To successfully leverage a metaverse in your higher education institution, there are several key steps you should take to prepare:

• Educate yourself and your team: Research case studies and examples of successful metaverse implementations at other institutions and attend industry events and webinars on the topic.

• Define clear and realistic goals: Create an innovation team that includes IT leaders, faculty, and students to determine what they want out of your implementation. This team should identify key performance indicators (KPIs) such as increased student retention, improved test scores, or more scalable content creation.

• Evaluate vendor and consultant offerings: Challenge vendors and consultants to provide specific success stories of metaverse technology implementations in higher education institutions and evaluate these examples against your institution's needs.

• Establish technical requirements and integration standards: Identify necessary infrastructure and application integrations, as well as any technical specifications or requirements for the platform itself.

• Address security, privacy, and ethical concerns: Develop institutional policies about metaverse usage where needed, and work with your IT team to mitigate any potential risks or concerns.