An Educational Metaverse Experiment: The First On-Chain and In-Metaverse Academic Course

Abstract

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.