The term “Metaverse” originated from the science fiction novel Snow crash of Neal Stephenson.
Metaverse is a vast virtual realm mirroring the physical world, where humans embodied as avatars engage with each other without changing their place.
To understand this more practically, let’s imagine that you work at a coporation and you have an extremely important meeting to attend which requires your physical presence but due to some unavoidable cirsumstances you’re unable to get to the firm however despite being absent you can still attend the meeting by sending your avatar to the firm who will interact at the meeting with your clients and peers and make the meeting successful.
So, using this wonderful technology you can make my presence feel in a place where actually, you are absent.
Nowadays, Metaverse is being used for teaching, learning and for multiple other purposes as a result of which big tech companies have entered into the education market in view of the growing opportunity it offers. For instance parent company of Facebook and Instagram “Meta” has announced that its Meta immersive learning project would invest 150 million dollars in addition to this there is one more company called Roblox which aims to bring 3-D interactive virtual environment into the classroom.
In november 2021 Roblox announced 15 million dollars for educational organizations to develop curriculum and education experience using roblox.
These games will provides an immersive experience to students studying robotics, space exploration, engineering and medical science
Now, let us come to the core questions.
What problem does this technology solve? & Why higher education institutes should incorporate this to teach students?
There are certain disciplines of education which require highly expensive infrastructure and without which students can never get hands on experience, one best example of this is medical science where students need human bodies to learn about the functions of different organs and to be able to differentiate one organ from the other as well as learn to operate on human body which enables them to gain practical knowledge.
To solve this problem and reduce the expense of education, some medical schools are creating Mixed reality environment to teach anatomy(is a branch of science that deals with the structure of body) and other classes.
Case Western reserver university’s “state of the future” building involves holo lens and mix reality environment. It plans to discontinue traditional cadaver(a dead human body) filled labs used for anatomy classes. Instead, medical students with holo lens headsets can see see the body’s organs and functions. for ex: a hologram of the digestive system involves labels an organs such as the stomach, gall bladder & liver.
Second problem that it solves is that it reduces the higher cost of education. Higher education institutes have resource constraints which do not allow them to purchase advance equipments for laboratories due its high cost and maintainenace.
The metaverse has provided an alternative resource to support learning and teaching, for instance a virtual cadaver(a dead human body) lab has made scientific learning affordable at fisk university virtual cadaver do not degrade and are easy to maintain.
Third problem that it solves is that Metaverse bridges a rural-urban gap exists in access to quality education. In rural areas where students do not have access to quality education and opportunities to excel in their career as a result of which they have to satisfy themselves with sub-standard quality of education.
Metaverse can address this rural-urban gap by increasing access to educational resources to students who live in remote areas, for instance South Dakota university expects its metaveristy to help reach the state’s rural students.
Enhancing students performance.
In some situation it is found that virtual-world training methods are superior and effective to traditional way of teaching or classroom based teaching. This can provide a more effective means of explaining visually demonstrating concepts and giving step by step instructions to illustrate concepts.
In feb 2021, Morehouse collegen in Atlanta, georgia came up with a proof of concept course which involves VR courses in world history, biology, and chemistry.
The college found that the VR world history class had a 10% increase in student’s grade point averages. compared to the same class taught via zoom and face-to-face the year before. so, metaverse, greatly helps students in improving their understanding of the subject.
using metaverse while learning history students can visit historically significant locations wearings VR headsets. It is very challenginng to take all students of the class to historical places and make them aware of its importance, here metaverse can be of great help in achieving this objective, further in chemistry classes VR allows visualization of atoms in a protein which is impossible to demonstrate in regular classroom lectures.
using metaverse one can perform lab experiments or practice without using real chemicals and componds which saves expenses of HEIs(Higher education institutions).
Challenges and barriers:
There are numerous potential challenges and barriers that higher education institutions encounter in adopting and implementing the Metaverse.
First, Metaverse reduces cost in some activities while some othter activities require significant investments and high opererational costs that may limit its utilization in other activities.
HEIs also also need to spend significant time and resources to provide training to faculty to prepare courses using metaverse.
VR is likely to provide even deper impact on students view of certain issues. It makes a deep impression in their mind and they tend to retain information for a long time because of its visuals.
Conclusion: Metaverse is a digital space which allows humans as avatars to socialize, learn, play games with each other in a three dimensional world.
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