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Learning in the Metaverse A New Horizon for Professionals

  • Writer: horizonshiftlab
    horizonshiftlab
  • Oct 23
  • 15 min read
Smiling woman wearing VR headset interacts with a virtual display showing "Soil Readings." Futuristic landscape background with large trees.
Image Source: Mary Beth Faller via Arizona State University: ASU News

The metaverse is a complex and often misunderstood concept, but its potential for revolutionizing learning is becoming increasingly clear. It's not a single technology, but a convergence of various technologies that enable us to interact in a digital space in a way that mimics and attempts to mirror our physical interactions. This next stage of the internet, known as Web 3.0, will transform online social spaces into interconnected virtual worlds with their own associated cultures and lifestyles.


So, what does this mean for the future of learning, particularly for professionals looking to reskill or upskill?





The Power of Immersive Learning


While the concept of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the classroom has existed for a decade, widespread adoption has been slow due to high costs, a lack of quality applications, and the need for teacher training. However, the landscape is changing. Meta's "Meta for Education," launched in November of last year, is making immersive learning more accessible with affordable headsets and dedicated apps for educators and administrators.


Studies show the significant benefits of immersive learning:

  • Increased Engagement: In a pilot program with universities and schools, 90% of students reported increased engagement with VR.

  • Improved Academic Performance: Students who used VR in a biology course at Arizona State University had higher grades and were more engaged than their peers in a standard course.

  • Enhanced Confidence: 25% of students in the Meta pilot program reported increased confidence in their knowledge.

  • Accessibility for All: Immersive experiences can provide access to learning opportunities for students with diverse needs, such as those with autism, neurodivergence, or who live in rural areas with limited access to resources.


Beyond STEM: Building Empathy and Communication


While the value of VR for technical and STEM subjects is evident—imagine taking apart a molecule in chemistry or dissecting an alien creature in a biology class—its application goes far beyond that. One of the most significant skill gaps in the modern workplace is in empathy and communication.


A Stanford study demonstrated that VR training can help bridge this gap. In a 10-minute simulated performance review, managers who used VR to practice giving critical feedback showed a change in their language, making it more personalized and authentic. The study's implications suggest that consistent use of VR tools could be a valuable asset for managers and mid-career professionals looking to improve their soft skills.


The Future is Now


The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital tools in education, providing the impetus and funding for a shift toward immersive learning. Companies like Dreamscape Immersive, co-founded by former DreamWorks head Walter Parkes, are partnering with universities like Arizona State University to create immersive biology courses that have shown a 9% improvement in average grades.


The metaverse offers a new horizon for learning, providing not only a pathway for technical reskilling but also a powerful tool for developing essential human skills like empathy and communication. As technology becomes more affordable and scalable, immersive learning experiences will become more accessible to working professionals seeking to navigate their careers and stay relevant in a rapidly changing world.


This article is based on the Signal Shift podcast episode, "Learning in the Metaverse."


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Episode Transcript:

Raakhee: (00:00) Hello and welcome to Signal Shift with me, Raakhee and Sue. We have been diving into the education sector this month from re-inventing the concept of college to the inescapable re-skilling we all have to do in midlife and beyond to the very real ways that AI is and will be impacting teachers and students. And today we are going to delve into learning in the metaverse or in virtual worlds. and learning through immersive experiences. A few years back, we had gamification. Today, we have large language models and virtual reality. Tomorrow, it's the metaverse. But the metaverse is a confusing concept in and of itself. It's not one specific thing or technology. It's the coming together of several types of technology that will allow us to interact in a digital space in a manner that resembles and attempts to mirror how we interact in physical spaces. It's the next stage of the internet called Web 3.0. And currently we have social spaces online. These will become virtual spaces and we will have associated lifestyles and cultures linked to them. We see it already with things like Roblox, but in time, these spaces will be everywhere and they won't just be small niches. They won't be siloed, but very much interconnected. You think of an obvious example, right? Right now we can do 3D tours of spaces like a house, you're viewing a house, and you gain a great sort of sense of spatial understanding of the space, right? Just through this limited technology. So imagine these tours being virtual experiences where you meet the realtor and bump into other buyers. And hey, there's some virtual crumble cookies that you get to have at the open house. And they'll probably include a physical discount code so when you get off there, you can go to the real crumble cookies. So I think we'll start to see more things like that in different spaces. More recently in my feed, I have to say, I came across the opportunity to purchase a virtual USC sort of Trojans attire, right? Like the sweatshirts and the hoodies And I did think about it and I contemplated. was like, maybe I should get this for my avatar and kind of show my affiliation. And it felt a lot more logical than buying another piece of clothing that's going to sit in my cupboard. And I think I would have and I imagine I will in the future. But it just shows where we are hitting with some of these things. So I think there's some interesting ways this is going to become a part of our lifestyles and how we will use it. So let's explore learning in the metaverse today. Sue did you find anything interesting in this space? Sue: (02:40) Yeah, Raakhee lots of interesting things happening in learning in immersive spaces. like you said, learning in VR and augmented reality, for instance, it's been around for a while. I I could even find articles very easily going back a decade about the promise of what this looks like in the classroom, for instance. But for so long, a lot of the potential has been mentioned. Like teacher surveys are generally very positive about the potential impact of it. It helps them teach, it increases engagement, confidence, and even in some cases, academic performance. It also, I found several articles about how it particularly helps differentiated populations. So students with autism or neurodivergence, other kinds of learning needs. Also, it helps rural students who are very far away from access from a lot of different kind of learning experiences. But the sample sizes are so small. when you do use it because they're really expensive in terms of the headsets. And not only that, you need to find really good apps, the good training for teachers and administrators, and then the integration you need for all your tech systems in the classroom as well. So I was thinking, there has to be an event like what happened with Google Chromebooks to become widely distributed and scalable. So Google Chromebooks, they have a huge ecosystem available for educators and learners. It's not just the price point for the Chromebooks itself, but it was all the apps and features that came with it for educators and administrators to use the Google Suite, things like that. And then add on the pandemic and remote learning. I mean, that just really catapulted the scalability. So I saw an article by Ed Week, which is kind of an industry trade publication, but it was saying that, you know, even prior to the pandemic, one-to-one digital use was starting to increase pretty significantly, especially the use of Google Chromebooks. But by March 2021, based on their survey, 90 % of district leaders said that they were providing a one-to-one device for every middle and high school student and 84 % for elementary students. So, you what's the scalability of VR? Well, until recently, it was Just that, like classroom by classroom, maybe you're lucky to get a grant, you know, maybe you have a well-funded school, you can do this. But Meta, in November of last year, announced Meta for Education is available for widespread use. And so this includes more affordable headsets. It has the apps for the educators and the administrators. And they piloted this with a group of universities and with a network of 83 schools called the Inspired Education Group. And when they tested this, 90 % of students reported increased engagement, 25 % increased confidence in their knowledge, and 85 % of teachers found that this kind of augmented reality and mixed reality to be super valuable tool. And again, students did perform better on some of these multiple choice tests. So, still a long way to go, It's gonna require a mix of kind of industry scalability alongside teacher training and teacher engagement. So I'm really curious, maybe in November, they'll have an annual report saying how much this has increased in terms of adoption. I'd be really curious what it looks like. Raakhee: (06:01) So that's really exciting to know and that's kind of the next wave. And talking about benefits and then you spoke about the benefits upfront and as well as for school kids and what a different experience it is. And we went to the National History Museum in LA about two weeks back just for fun with a whole big group of us. And it was so interesting. Some of the people that I was with were younger people, like 30 year olds. And, you know, one is doing her master's in physics, the other is in biology, both extremely bright, And we were speaking about, we were seeing the wild cats and lions and all those things. And it was so interesting. And for my husband and I, was interesting, but a very flat experience because we have the opportunity to go on safari, right? And so that changes everything, right? And when we mentioned this to these girls who've grown up here and have gone to the top big schools and stuff, but you grow up in a very average lifestyle, you don't have access to stuff like that, right? And they were like, what? And they were so interested in learning about it. We couldn't entirely give them a sense of how different that is to seeing these images, these models of these creatures. But we were just like, you have to do this. And I just thought about this experience. I was like, imagine what it'll be like for all these young kids world around to be able to come that much closer to that sort of experience, where you really get a sense of. Oh my gosh, yes, a lion. That is why that is so scary. And that's what a roar really feels like and rattles my bones. I think there's so much benefit to those experiences, those novel, very real life experiences is there something like that that you think about that you would love for kids to experience or? Something that you think will be so like virtual reality is gonna help with so much to experience. Sue: (08:02) Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that immediately comes to mind is what you're saying, just the exposure, for instance, to STEM. There are so many research studies about who becomes a scientist and the importance of exposure at a young age. And essentially, I think it was like by middle school, it's kind of too late. Like you have to have those experiences by middle school because then you need all the coursework in order to follow and pursue that field. So to me, having this accessible to so many students who, like you said, normally wouldn't be able to go, like, feel what it feels or hear that lion roar. Or even I was thinking, like, what was the statistic of how many kids from Los Angeles never have been to the beach in Los Angeles, right? Just even some of those first experiences, and hopefully you get there too. But for those where transportation is a huge impediment. There are other ways you can experience this. So yeah, I would love to see that. And I think the meta press release for metaphor education said, know, VR, it's not for all cases. There were like very specific use cases where this is very helpful and things like exposure to those kinds of experiences where you can't get access. That's huge. So I would be excited. I mean, even personally, to be able to experience going to the. know, the wonders of the world or going to Victoria Falls. I don't know when I would ever be able to get there to see kind of experience that I would love. I would love that. Raakhee: (09:25) Yeah, totally. I'm thinking, I know we both love to travel, so that would be amazing. Yeah, think my signal, think definitely things that resonated from what you said with my signal is one, COVID really helped with this. It is an example of a way really immersive learning is being used in a very cool sense. It's in a university setting, and it was really awesome to find this, but COVID really set them up. if COVID didn't happen, I don't think there would have been that much impetus and funding into saying, let's do this. And let's take money out of entertainment, essentially, and put it towards learning, because there's going to be a payback on this. So the signal that the one that I found was it's a company called Dreamscape Immersive. It's co-founded by Walter Parkes, who was the former head of DreamWorks Motion Pictures. and a writer or a slash producer on movies like Gladiator, Men in Black, that sort of thing. And this company has a partnership with Arizona State University called Dreamscape Learn. And they, in 2022, so it's already, you know, it's a couple of years now, two, three years ago, they experimented for the first time with a biology course in a virtual reality experience. This now, I mean, it did so well, is now part of the biology offering since, OK, and they are going to be expanding to other STEM areas. So it's an intro to biology class, and students interact with creatures kind of in an intergalactic wildlife sanctuary. They call it alien zoo. And they have to find out what's happening with these creatures, why are they dying? So they have to go through process of dissection and understanding the anatomy of these creatures. It looks really cool from the images I've seen, I've got to say. It makes biology just different, So a total of 486 students were in the sort of Intro to Biology, and they split them. Half of them, like 243, were placed in the Dreamscape Learn course. And it had three parts, right? So you still had your lectures, you had your three-hour lab, but you also had this virtual reality experience. And the other half of the group just went through the lecture and the lab work, right? No VR experience. And the results, because they surveyed and they took the results from all of this and looked at it. And the results showed that students in the Dreamscape Learn Lab course had higher grades. There was about a 9 % overall difference in average across the groups. And they were more engaged than their peers who took the standard course. Now, this course was built, I mean, it's probably one of the really nice educational ones out there. So was built very intelligently. It's built not just to go in there alone, but you actually experience it with your peers and students in there. They had all the gear, so they had the chairs, right? So you feel the vibrations. They had the big headsets. They had like these sensors you wear on your hands, joysticks to control things. And they were set up in these rooms where they could do this. So obviously, This must have cost a lot. This must be costing a lot. But yeah, it's really interesting to see that it worked. They're still using it, and it's going to be expanding. And I think to your point, we're going to see this tip off where as the tech gets even more affordable, and we can scale the technology. I think we'll hopefully see it more and more. But the intention is that this works particularly for STEM and things we need to see, experience, and go a little bit deeper in. So yeah, right now, Dreamscape is available at Arizona State University, Rowan University, Long Beach City College, and Merced. Sue: (13:01) That's so cool. I was just thinking how much better would I have done in chemistry if I could have had a headset on to like take apart a molecule and just understand more of its components. So much of it is about engagement and hands-on learning, right, which is hard to do in some, especially for STEM subjects when you're looking at a textbook or some text, know, so that's great. Raakhee: (13:21) I think we could have all been different and done different things. And so Such an interesting time. So interesting to see what all the young kids of today are going to learn and do and become really, really exciting. So yeah, what else did you find in this space? Sue: (13:36) Yeah, so you're talking about young kids. And my first signal is really about what we're doing in the classroom. But a lot of what we focused on this month is learning for adults, right? Again, not a formal training experience. What's happening? We talked a little bit about mid-career reskilling. And one of the things we've talked about VR, AR benefits is really technical learning, right? STEM subjects, things like that. And yet we've seen one of the biggest skill gaps in the workplace is empathy and communication. So I actually found that not only can VR and AR like immersive experiences help in the technical realm, it can actually also help build empathy and communication, especially the way it's being built right now. And I saw that they're doing this in the workplace. So Stanford released a study over the summer. that shows that VR training can actually help build empathy in the workplace. And the way they did that is they did it in the context of a performance review, which is already, you know, like full of emotions and awkward conversations. And they did it specifically to give feedback to an employee that has some critical feedback. And so the person is in the role of a manager. and has to give this feedback to a simulated employee. And they have video recording of kind of visual and audio feedback, what they're doing. And then they have to finish after getting feedback on that to write an email to the employee as a follow-up. And they had a couple of different conditions. But basically what they found was that even in this kind of 10-minute feedback session, their expression and understanding of the employee situation already changed. And so their language was changing from to something more personalized, something more authentic. And so it was showing that there is this ability to have this immediate feedback that can change the way you're interacting with employees. And so they said, the implications of this could be interesting that this is just 10 minutes. What if you had VR tools to actually help you throughout the workday? How could that change you, especially as a manager? And so again, for mid-career folks who are kind of mid-level management and beyond, right, this is a tool that could become very, very helpful in the future. I'm not sure what the avatar effect is. I'm sure there are a lot of studies on it. But I've seen, you know, if you're in the metaverse with your avatar, it can actually increase empathy and understanding. helps build your confidence in some ways that it can't when you're just kind of out in the world. So I thought that was a really interesting area for further study. Raakhee: (16:12) what a great use case. And clearly from everything we've been discussing, a necessary use, I think, of virtual reality for adults. And it's so interesting. From what I've been reading in some of the research, exactly to what you said, is that it allows more vulnerability when you're in these online spaces and virtual spaces, right? You can be more confident. So even with students, they feel that they speak up more. They're OK to give an answer than they would be in an actual class with 20 other students where you're worried that people are going to turn around and laugh at you. Right. So you're OK to give answers and that sort of thing. So think that's so interesting. What a great way for us to learn to build empathy. What are your takeaways from everything we've discussed today and the world of like learning in the metaverse? Sue: (17:01) Yeah, I was just thinking about this and back to our earlier episodes on the future of learning. And we were talking about, you know, is the four-year degree or kind of the university experience as we know it, is it going away? If you're packaging a lot of the micro credentials, having some more online learning, we talked about kind of that social connection as a potential gap and the lab that you mentioned, right? And dreamed up of like what these spaces could look like. You could easily see these programs integrated. in there to make sure that there is still kind of some tangible measure of development around kind of the socio-emotional learning aspect. So I think that could be really interesting in the end. yeah, I think more than anything, it's here. It's just a matter of scale, like how accessible is it going to be? And yeah, I guess I just wonder the potential is obviously huge for businesses and how to make sure they can retain and re-skill. their employees. I haven't seen as much study around that, but I would love to see what's going to happen in the workplace in the future. Raakhee: (18:02) Yeah, the University of the Future, I think we've painted an exciting picture of it through the last few episodes. So yeah, I'm very excited to see that. as always, thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And let us know what you think about this. Have you dabbled in any kind of learning in an immersive space? What is it like? And yeah, what would you like to study in an immersive space or in the metaverse? And we will catch you again next week. Thanks so much. Bye for now.

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