Bringing the Metaverse to Higher Education: Engaging University Students in Virtual Worlds

Introduction

Higher Education teaching practice is in significant flux as staff reflect on the experiences of teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. As noted in a recent white paper (Manifesto, 2020), Universities face many challenges in understanding and responding to rapidly evolving student expectations when considering the relative merits of traditional campus-based versus online learning strategies. Moreover, there is widespread recognition that students’ online learning experiences have not always been positive during the pandemic (Neves & Hewitt, 2021) – affected to a degree by the extensive appropriation of work/corporate platforms (such as 2D video conferencing software) into the predominately younger-person-focused Higher Education context.

In contrast, the pandemic has accelerated thinking regarding the use of Extended Reality (XR) for universities, expressed clearly in the Immersive Learning Network’s 2021 report on the opportunities, barriers and catalysts to XR in the education domain (Lee et al., 2021). In their report they note that XR technologies have undergone massive developmental changes since early 2020 and now provide a level of maturity enabling practitioners to significantly enhance the student learning experience. Moreover, they emphasise the considerable potential of XR to enhance students’ social learning experiences, as noted (p. 37):

This chapter provides an empirical study on the specific use of XR in a HE context. In particular, the Covid-19 pandemic created a unique opportunity to quantify and qualify the social experiences of Engineering students who only interacted with the teachers and each other within a virtual world. For the autumn/fall semester 2020 face-to-face teaching at the University of Nottingham where the study took place was severely restricted – and most interaction with students was conducted online. For the level 4 module (taken by final year undergraduate and postgraduate taught students), ‘MMME4084 - Simulation, Virtual Reality and Advanced Human-Machine Interface’, a decision was made to undertake all forms of teaching using the social VR platform Mozilla Hubs – the module convenors and the students never met face-to-face during the semester.

Specifically, the overall aim of this research was to understand the impact of a virtual world on University students’ learning experiences. In terms of objectives, data needed to be collected and analysed for questionnaire/ interview (subjective) and behavioural (objective) responses throughout the teaching activities. Recommendations could then be made on the implications of the findings for Higher Education practice.

This chapter includes a review of background literature on the use of XR in the Higher Education sector, followed by a description of the study methodology utilised in our work. The chapter then outlines some key quantitative results, predominately focussing on survey data collected. The main bulk of the chapter discusses some central themes emerging from qualitative analysis of interviews and behavioural observations. The final section of the chapter sets out five fundamental guidelines for practitioners that have emerged from our study, together with four future work recommendations.

Background

Extended Reality (XR) is a broad term encompassing many related concepts, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Augmented Virtuality (AV) and Mixed Reality (MR) (Palmas & Klinker, 2018). The focus for this chapter is VR, which in itself has many competing definitions within the literature. As noted by Jerald (2016), these can be more technology-focused and related to the concept of immersion, or more people-focused and linked to presence (‘being there’). In educational contexts, it is critical to consider VR in human-centred terms – and many authors have argued that it is human perception that is critical to a “VR” experience, rather than technological capabilities (see for example Häfner et al., 2013; Radianti et al., 2020).

A central component of VR will be the virtual world/environment itself. In this respect, a useful and comprehensive perspective is given by Girvan (2018, p. 1099) – who describes virtual worlds as: