By now, you’ve heard about the metaverse and have some understanding of it. Like all good buzzwords, there’s plenty of smoke, a few funhouse mirrors, and just enough intrigue and promise to captivate. And when you strip away the NFT hype and take off the VR headset, there really is promise—especially in the world of education.
Over the past couple months, our little “think-tank” sponsored by k20 Educators and Gather.town has investigated just what promise #web3.0 might hold for the future of education. In particular we’ve looked closely at virtual learning environments (VLEs), both creating our own and evaluating the submissions of others to Gather competitions. Gather is of course just one of many platforms creating the next wave of technology that could drastically improve access and quality of education; companies like Synthesis and Dreamscape Immersive, to name a couple, are also spending a great deal of money to create virtual learning environments. And, as with any investment, the most pressing question is: “is it worth it?” To answer this question, we must consider what makes a virtual learning environment valuable in the first place.
Nearly two full years into pandemic conditions, the world is quite aware of the drawbacks of remote working environments. It would be silly to assume that any VLE could be better than learning in person across the board, but to ignore their potential would be akin to betting against online degree programs in the 1990’s. So what makes a VLE valuable? A simple calculation is that its novel value must exceed the costs of any drawbacks. In order to consider the costs and benefits, let us first consider them with regard to the student’s experience (and save the educator’s experience for a forthcoming article).
After some consideration and group discussion, we determined that at least one of the three criteria below must be true in order for a virtual learning environment to be a valuable virtual learning environment.
The VLE provides access to higher quality material, teachers, and/or students than a student can currently access.
The easiest improvement in the era of information systems is that of access to education. VLEs on web3 promise to build on the improvements of web2; where Wikipedia was once a radical improvement by creating an endless library of knowledge and online degree programs drastically reduced tuition, web3 technology has the potential to improve access to not only high quality educational material, but also to instructors and students.
The VLE creates a learning experience that is more effective than a real world counterpart.
Whereas matters of accessibility are easy to judge as they are usually 0 to 1 improvements, effectiveness is a little more difficult. Nonetheless, there already exists evidence that innovations in edtech such as gamification can improve student outcomes. A broad promise of web3 is the ability to cater to individual experiences, which suggests that new education experiences have the potential to accommodate individual learning styles. Take this Gather space, for example. Here a student can determine the pace of their discovery in a way that would be difficult to replicate in a classroom.
The VLE creates an entirely new learning experience.
This final criteria might be the most difficult to judge objectively of the three, but it may also be the most important. Equitable education is a matter of access and effectiveness, but the highest aim of education is to facilitate discovery. Naturally, this is difficult to design because it can’t exactly be done with perfect foresight; there is something experimental about it. With this in mind, a few examples of “new learning experiences” may help us envision what we can expect from expanded web capabilities, augmented reality, or virtual reality. The Common School Movement brought children from different backgrounds together under one roof; the Student Letter Exchange connected pen pals in different countries; the introduction of “cloud” infrastructure enabled students to collaborate for the first time in real time on digital projects. And one soon-to-be-realized example of metaversian innovation is a collaboration between Dreamscape Immersive and Arizona State University, where, among other things, students will be able to practice applying biological principles to entirely new species.
Simply put, a valuable, worthwhile VLE is one that improves on the status quo. A virtual environment that simply recreates a classroom, for instance, is not a valuable VLE, nor is one that entertains more than it educates. A valuable VLE must be something worth investing time and effort, and must be something that improves access, outcomes, or opportunity for students. Otherwise, there’s something else worth building.
Credit is owed to Terence Finnegan, Ezequiel Aleman, Michelle Bakerson, and the rest of the k20 Think Tank fellows for discussions that contributed to the writing of this article.