Metaverse in Education: Vision, Opportunities, and Challenges

Traditional education has been updated with the development of information technology in human history. Within big data and cyber-physical systems, the Metaverse has generated strong interest in various applications (e.g., entertainment, business, and cultural travel) over the last decade. As a novel social work idea, the Metaverse consists of many kinds of technologies, e.g., big data, interaction, artificial intelligence, game design, Internet computing, Internet of Things, and blockchain. It is foreseeable that the usage of Metaverse will contribute to educational development. However, the architectures of the Metaverse in education are not yet mature enough. There are many questions we should address for the Metaverse in education. To this end, this paper aims to provide a systematic literature review of Metaverse in education. This paper is a comprehensive survey of the Metaverse in education, with a focus on current technologies, challenges, opportunities, and future directions. First, we present a brief overview of the Metaverse in education, as well as the motivation behind its integration. Then, we survey some important characteristics for the Metaverse in education, including the personal teaching environment and the personal learning environment. Next, we envisage what variations of this combination will bring to education in the future and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We also review the state-of-the-art case studies (including technical companies and educational institutions) for Metaverse in education. Finally, we point out several challenges and issues in this promising area.Comment: IEEE BigData 2022. 10 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

La plataforma EDUCAGENT: agentes conversacionales inteligentes y entornos virtuales aplicados a la docencia

El desarrollo de la Web 2.0 y el gran interés alcanzado por las redes sociales ha posibilitado la introducción de un gran número de aplicaciones y entornos educativos que posibilitan nuevas formas de comunicación e interacción entre sus usuarios. En este contexto, los mundos virtuales y los agentes conversacionales facilitan la creación de entornos educativos que intensifican la percepción entre sus usuarios y que proporcionan una comunicación más natural y adaptada a las características y preferencias específicas de cada usuario. En este artículo describimos un sistema multiagente desarrollado para el apoyo a la docencia y el aprendizaje autónomo de los alumnos. A través del sistema, se presenta a los alumnos casos y problemas que deben resolver, y que posibilitan además la autoevaluación de su aprendizaje, especialmente en iniciativas de tele-educación y realización de cursos on-line. La plataforma EducAgent se ha desarrollado en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid dentro de la Convocatoria de Apoyo a Experiencias de Innovación e Internacionalización Docente. El objetivo principal del proyecto es la creación de un espacio virtual innovador basado en los postulados del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, que haga de las asignaturas y cursos on-line un espacio más flexible, participativo y atractivoWith the development of so-called Web 2.0 and the great interest and extension that social networks have now reached, a large number of e-learning environments and applications that originate new forms of communication and interaction among users have been quickly introduced. Within this framework, virtual worlds and conversational agents facilitate the creation of educative applications that intensify the perception between their users and provide a more natural communication adapted to the characteristics and specific preferences of each user. In this paper, we describe a multi-agent system developed for teaching support and student’s self-learning. The main objective of the EducAgent platform is the creation of an innovative virtual space following the principles of the European Higher Education Area to make subjects and e-learning initiatives to become a more flexible, participatory and attractive space. One of the most important characteristics of the developed platform is to facilitate a more natural interaction between the system and students by means of conversational agents. We describe the main features of the EducAgent platform and its application in the new European Computer Science Degree at the Carlos III University of Madrid.Trabajo llevado a cabo dentro de la 9ª Convocatoria de Apoyo a Experiencias de Innovación e Internacionalización Docente de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid y financiado parcialmente por los Proyectos CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008- 06732-C02-02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485) y DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

A Proposal to Create Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds Integrating Advanced Educative Resources

Social Networking has been a global consumer phenomenon during the last few years. Online communities are changing the way people behave, share and interact within their daily lives. Most of such communities are mainly focused on sharing contents and communicating using a traditional web interface. However, social virtual worlds are computer-simulated environments that the users can "inhabit" and in which they can interact and create objects. Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. In this paper, we highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. We have implemented the proposal in a learning system for several subjects of the Computer Science degree in our university and show that it fostered engagement and collaboration and helped the students to better understand complex concepts.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN 2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC 2011-28626 C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS 2008-07029-C02-02.Enviad

Is Metaverse in education a blessing or a curse: a combined content and bibliometric analysis

The Metaverse has been the centre of attraction for educationists for quite some time. This field got renewed interest with the announcement of social media giant Facebook as it rebranding and positioning it as Meta. While several studies conducted literature reviews to summarize the findings related to the Metaverse in general, no study to the best of our knowledge focused on systematically summarizing the finding related to the Metaverse in education. To cover this gap, this study conducts a systematic literature review of the Metaverse in education. It then applies both content and bibliometric analysis to reveal the research trends, focus, and limitations of this research topic. The obtained findings reveal the research gap in lifelogging applications in educational Metaverse. The findings also show that the design of Metaverse in education has evolved over generations, where generation Z is more targeted with artificial intelligence technologies compared to generation X or Y. In terms of learning scenarios, there have been very few studies focusing on mobile learning, hybrid learning, and micro learning. Additionally, no study focused on using the Metaverse in education for students with disabilities. The findings of this study provide a roadmap of future research directions to be taken into consideration and investigated to enhance the adoption of the Metaverse in education worldwide, as well as to enhance the learning and teaching experiences in the Metaverse