TY - GEN
T1 - An Educational Metaverse Experiment
T2 - 19th European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems, EMCIS 2022
AU - Themistocleous, Marinos
AU - Christodoulou, Klitos
AU - Katelaris, Leonidas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - The Metaverse is not a new concept; nor its use for educational purpose. Despite its considerable attention and recent popularity, largely due to Facebook’s strategic bet, educators have been experimenting with such an environment for a while. Still though, educational activities that are delivered over a Metaverse environment require further exploration to fully understand their full potential, opportunities, and challenges, since such activities differ from traditional on-campus or e-learning education. Nowadays, the area of on-chain education in the Metaverse remains unexplored. In this paper, we are presenting the findings from our attempt to deliver the first of its kind on-chain and in the Metaverse course delivered by the University of Nicosia (UNIC). The course was offered in Fall 2022 as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and was attended by 22,500 students. The paper reports interesting observations from this experiment highlighting lessons learned and open issues for further research. The findings reveal that a Metaverse-like environment that is structured for offering educational experiences to potential learners is likely to disrupt existing educational paradigms and academic practices. We are at a stage where significant amount of research and development is required to further understand and explore the opportunities for the application of a “meta” environment for education.
AB - The Metaverse is not a new concept; nor its use for educational purpose. Despite its considerable attention and recent popularity, largely due to Facebook’s strategic bet, educators have been experimenting with such an environment for a while. Still though, educational activities that are delivered over a Metaverse environment require further exploration to fully understand their full potential, opportunities, and challenges, since such activities differ from traditional on-campus or e-learning education. Nowadays, the area of on-chain education in the Metaverse remains unexplored. In this paper, we are presenting the findings from our attempt to deliver the first of its kind on-chain and in the Metaverse course delivered by the University of Nicosia (UNIC). The course was offered in Fall 2022 as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and was attended by 22,500 students. The paper reports interesting observations from this experiment highlighting lessons learned and open issues for further research. The findings reveal that a Metaverse-like environment that is structured for offering educational experiences to potential learners is likely to disrupt existing educational paradigms and academic practices. We are at a stage where significant amount of research and development is required to further understand and explore the opportunities for the application of a “meta” environment for education.
KW - education
KW - experiment
KW - Metaverse
KW - MOOC
KW - on-chain
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85161469750&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-30694-5_47
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-30694-5_47
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85161469750
SN - 9783031306938
T3 - Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
SP - 678
EP - 690
BT - Information Systems - 19th European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern Conference, EMCIS 2022, Proceedings
A2 - Papadaki, Maria
A2 - Rupino da Cunha, Paulo
A2 - Themistocleous, Marinos
A2 - Christodoulou, Klitos
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 21 December 2022 through 22 December 2022
ER -