Metaverse Monetizing Education
Users can buy, socialise, engage in recreational activities, and even learn in the Metaverse, a virtual environment where each user is represented by an avatar. Many big giants, including Facebook (which just changed its corporate name to Meta) and Microsoft, have made its development a priority.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described how the metaverse would transform life in a recent video presentation. A major emphasis was placed on education. The process of learning would become immersive. Students can virtually “teleport” to any location or time by donning glasses or a headset. Any item, even a planet, a human organ, or an automobile engine, might be brought to them for study.
The metaverse has already influenced some parts of higher education. The ability of the metaverse to increase profit in higher education is where its true revolutionary potential rests.
Current technologies
A single avatar can travel between different environments, such as an online store and a lecture hall, thanks to the metaverse. Many of the specific advancements listed in Facebook’s presentation, meanwhile, are already available in certain capacities.
Universities employ virtual worlds like Second Life and even the block-building game Minecraft. They might improve lectures or let online students virtually visit a campus. Students studying medicine or architecture can practise skills that are challenging to master in real life with the aid of virtual reality simulations.
Students will be able to experience university in a more “cyber-physical” way thanks to the metaverse, where the virtual and physical worlds converge. In his speech, Zuckerberg discussed how the metaverse would result in the hiring of programmers and artists to create brand-new learning environments. However, this sector of the economy is already active. An illustration of this is online “edutainment,” where games that combine teaching and enjoyment help students learn.
Monetizing education
The way that academic research and university education are funded may alter as a result of the metaverse. This has altered with the development of virtual worlds like Zoom.
The words and ideas of the metaverse professor may be repackaged and presented by artificial intelligence in the metaverse if recorded academic lectures are made the intellectual property of universities rather than of individual speakers. These technologies might make it possible to create an endless supply of lectures given by a variety of animated and avatar academics.
Money transfers between the metaverse and the real world will be available. Students might discover that there are numerous novel alternatives to pay for their education. This may involve paying in Bitcoin, transforming a virtual certification obtained into a real-world certificate, or purchasing a seat in a lecture hall with a very amusing animated professor.
The metaverse may ultimately spell the end for certain conventional university education models. Students could choose to enrol in a variety of cyber-physical institutions rather than just one physical one. They could get knowledge via virtual experiences offered by a variety of international universities in the metaverse.
In order to create experiences for students, academics may collaborate with developers. University professors’ careers may take them into self-employment where they can offer a variety of clients customised learning experiences.
Taking it to the next level
Metaverse can integrate technology that can speed up delivery services through creative, cutting-edge, and original solutions in order to advance virtual education.
For instance, the Korea Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (KAIST) provides its students with recorded lessons and a 60:40 real-time virtual class ratio. Students gave the combination format positive feedback.
In addition, there will be lots of online campus tours. The institution can remove the geographic obstacles that distinguish students and faculty from various regions of the world thanks to this virtual visit. Because they can quickly access virtual locations on the Metaverse, parents and children no longer have to travel for hours to visit the campus.
Conclusion
Ironically, the expansion of the metaverse might someday give rise to alternatives to face-to-face interactions. In this imagined future, academicians who are replaced by AI lecturers will switch to in-person cooperative education, as will students who cannot afford cutting-edge online learning opportunities.
Since the epidemic, students whose education has gone online have become more vocal in their demands for a return to in-person lectures. It’s possible that the metaverse won’t be the only way that education develops in the future.
