How Do I Integrate the Metaverse?
Immersive virtual reality experiences already exist within education. For example, Oculus has a variety of educational virtual reality games on topics from walking with dinosaurs to traveling the human body. KaiXR is another example of virtual experiences where students can engage in a virtual reality field trip to a variety of locations including The Nickelodeon Headquarters, the Egyptian Pyramids and the Solar System. These examples meet many of the reasons why to integrate the metaverse into our classrooms including being engaging and equity of experience.
Photo Source: Kaixr.com
However, I was not successful in locating metaverse technologies that already exist for elementary students that truly immerse students in meaningful, teacher-guided co-experiences where students engage in problem solving or work collaboratively in a virtual world. Miller and Bass (2019) state that, “the choices we make about the tools and resources that we provide to students and teachers must be intentional and deliberate” (p. 46). This will be true within the metaverse as well and Hirsh-Pasek et al. emphasize that educators must “determine whether the virtual space in the metaverse they are designing is likely to be truly educational or merely just fun” (2022). Hirsh-Pasek et al. stress that “a metaverse can be designed to offer a context and experiences that enable and encourage collaboration, communication, mastery of content, creative thinking, creative innovation, and confidence” (2022) and that these are the types of experiences we should be striving for when accessing the metaverse in our classrooms. We must be careful to not simply recreate in person lessons in virtual spaces, but rather to beyond what’s possible within the physical space of a classroom. There’s so much more potential for deeper learning and development of skills through the metaverse in the future.
The following excerpt from Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2022) help paint a picture of the types of metaverse worlds we can hope to immerse our students in in the future:
"Imagine a circular classroom, surrounded by white boards and populated with movable chairs. Energized students are mesmerized by the tales of the Greek myths, the power of Zeus the god of the sky, and stories of the great Hercules—his son—whose strength was legendary. Suddenly, a timeline is projected onto the middle of the floor. Children whisk away their chairs to stand in the present, ready to move backward and descend into the year 300 BC—a year in which they will encounter a new reality. They enter the metaverse of Greek culture. Carts buzz by them, traders in marketplaces surround them and high atop the hill, they see—with their own eyes—the temples of the gods and the people who worship them. They explore, they ask questions, they ponder, they learn! Then, the teacher positions each child on the timeline so that they return to the present. The walls around them turn to images of brown dust in which they see ruined old temples and pieces of columns dotted along the ground. Each child is now given a chance to become the archeologist, to use her avatar to find the answers to the question of how we construct the past while nested squarely in the present. The avatars are equipped with a shovel, a brush, and are given a plot to till. The teacher continues, “The society that you witnessed, like all societies of times past, became buried in the dirt. Each layer of dirt is like a story book that you can uncover and piece together.” The children move their avatars and begin to examine the dirt in a new way—in a careful and inquisitive way. Each finds shards of pottery and even partial faces of statues that once stood tall. After 20 minutes of working the soil, they show their discoveries to the others in the class. Opportunities for collaborative learning and co-creation are embedded into the virtual and real learning spaces they have built together. Piecing their shards together as if they were solving a historical puzzle, they find an urn and a statue. They learn that the myths are more than stories—they were part of a bygone religion called paganism that real people practiced during time now buried beneath the earth’s surface. Archeologists like them helped to rediscover that society."
These are the types of Magic School Bus-esque encounters that educators will hopefully have access to within the future of the metaverse. Imagine guiding your class through a coral reef while learning about habitats, through the ventricles of a heart while learning about the circulatory system, or on Mars while learning about the solar system. In each of these virtual worlds, students could work through challenges together to collaborate and experience deeper learning. While it is disappointing to share that these types of experiences don’t exist yet, “in the digital age, librarians must . . . try to predict what the future will hold” (Miller & Bass, 2019, p. 1) and ultimately, this website does seek to predict the future of the metaverse and education and have teachers feel more prepared and less skeptical about the metaverse in the future.
Through however we access metaverse worlds in the future of education, we must remember that virtual experiences should not replace in-person learning and interactions. Johnson et al., (2002) agree with this idea and state that they “use virtual reality technology to complement real-world experiences rather than replace them” (p. 6). In discussion of the virtual reality experiences Johnson et al. (2002) emphasize that “for each student, interacting with the technology is less than a quarter of their time in this unit; most of the time is spent in the whole-class discussions” (p. 7). Rebecca Kantar from Roblox helps ease the worry that some educators may have that the metaverse seeks to replace in-person learning by explaining the importance of co-experience within the metaverse:
“One of the most defining aspects, as Roblox imagines it of the metaverse really involves co-experience . . . like people doing thing together that are fun, that are interesting, that are adventuresome, that are broadening their horizons. It’s not about replacing all your day every day where you’re going to be sitting in front of a screen living a virtual life instead of your real one, it’s instead about facilitating human co-experience and connection and playful learning” (How the Metaverse and Gaming Can Transform Education, 2022, 39:00).
We cannot substitute in-person learning and experiences with virtual experiences. However, we can look forward to providing students with new, immersive experiences that complement our in-person learning through access to the metaverse.
Until the vision of metaverse in education as described by Kantar (How the Metaverse and Gaming Can Transform Education, 2022) and Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2022) becomes a reality, teachers can begin to explore other ways of integrating virtual reality experiences including the following resources:
ClassVR:
KaiXR:
https://www.kaixr.com/products-2/explore
Oculus:
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/section/161391067688077/#/?_k=6t6b5a
Metaverse for Education - 5 Ways to Use Virtual Reality in School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogQ0X4ITHM
Resources:
Hirsh-Pasek, Z. J. K. M. (2022, March 9). A whole new world: Education meets the metaverse. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-whole-new-world-education-meets-the-metaverse/
How the Metaverse and Gaming Can Transform Education | ASU+GSV 2022. (2022, April 12). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGBTEz_vhkQ
Johnson, A., Moher, T., Cho, Y., Lin, Y., Haas, D., & Kim, J. (2002). Augmenting elementary school education with VR. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 22(2), 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/38.988740
Miller, S., & Bass, W. (2019). Leading from the Library: Help your School Community Thrive in the Digital Age. International Society for Technology in Education.
