What Is the Metaverse and How Does It Affect Education?

Rogelio Valdés

Dec 28, 2021

Enroll in the Elementary and Middle School program at robinacademy.com/escuela

You have probably heard about the shift in direction Facebook has taken. The company is moving its efforts away from being mainly a social media company built around Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and toward becoming a company that wants to build the “metaverse.” That is why Facebook is now called Meta. But what exactly is the metaverse?

The metaverse is a universe or reality that exists in virtual form. And there is not just one metaverse. Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are no longer just ordinary games. More and more, they host massive events and concerts by major artists that only exist live inside the virtual worlds of those platforms.

You might say, “but then games from 10 or 20 years ago like Halo, World of Warcraft, or any online multiplayer game were already metaverses.” And honestly, yes. We have been living virtual experiences for a long time. The difference now is that those experiences are becoming much more immersive and increasingly closer to what we can do in real life because technology has advanced.

To begin with, our internet connections now allow live events with audio, video, and complex 3D elements. I still remember waiting minutes for a photo or a song to load from the internet. A video could take hours.

Now we have virtual reality headsets that place us inside a 360-degree experience, with motion controllers advanced enough to replicate how we walk or even how our fingers move in a virtual environment. People who have lived through that experience often disconnect almost completely from physical reality and enter a different world.

With technologies like blockchain, we can create NFTs that represent ownership of property inside these virtual environments. There are already people buying virtual land and building spaces in the metaverse the same way they would build a stadium in a real city. By the way, NFTs go much deeper than that, and I could make several videos just on that topic. If you are interested, let me know in the comments.

All of these technologies are opening the door to more complex and realistic metaverses. It is obvious that entertainment will be transformed, but education will change radically too.

That is why all of our educational experiences happen inside a virtual world. Our curricular and extracurricular content is delivered within a virtual city. Students create and customize their avatar, have a treehouse of their own, and can visit different buildings where each one offers a different learning experience. We also have an economy inside the city where students earn Robins and exchange them for products.

For our live elementary and middle school sessions and group activities, we also work inside a virtual world. There we have different spaces, including a library where each shelf contains audiovisual content on different subjects, private classrooms, workspaces, play areas, break areas, and more. If you want to talk to someone, you simply walk your character closer to them, just like in real life. Need individual work time? Go to your private desk. It sounds simple, but we have seen how this changes online interaction completely. It does not feel like a basic Zoom or Teams call. Conversations become much more fluid and much more real.

That is how online education should feel. And this is only the beginning of how education enters the metaverse. In the coming years, we will increasingly work in 3D environments, then with VR headsets, and with even more immersive experiences.

If you want to learn more about our school and our elementary and middle school program, you can find all the information at robinacademy.com/escuela. You can even register there to schedule a Q&A session with me. You can also email me at rogelio@robinacademy.com.

And if what you want is for your child to help build the metaverses of the future, we also offer courses in video game programming, web development, animation, and more. You can find those at robinacademy.com/cursos.

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Enroll in the Elementary and Middle School program at robinacademy.com/escuela