Metaverse is all over the world right now. Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced “Facebook” changing its name to “Meta,” the whole world has been keen to see its future and is speculating about its impact on every landscape.
The metaverse is starting to spread into regular chats, culture, media at large, and private corporate deliberations as to whether and how to be a forerunner of this technology. Still, a lot of people don’t understand what exactly it is. Let’s talk about what metaverse is and how it will affect e-learning and the Learning and Development (L&D) industry.
The ‘metaverse’ is the term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, ‘Snow Crash,’ which envisioned a future of virtual reality. The metaverse is a network of 3-D virtual worlds where users can communicate, do business, learn, and form social ties through their virtual “avatars” and a lot more. Think of it as a replica of the real world in the virtual space. A significant feature of the metaverse is the focus on active engagement in events, which makes it particularly conducive to learning.
A form of the Metaverse is already being experienced by video gamers worldwide as they already play in the gaming environment through their 3-D avatars, which are a holographic representation of their own character. However, expanding this use case into the field of Learning and Development (L&D) isn’t so far-fetched.
The development of the metaverse expands L&D’s horizons. Virtual reality was already a popular trend in the eLearning sector, and now, technological breakthroughs are creating a digital space that will allow learners and instructors to communicate with each other through lifelike avatars. The Metaverse can help bring together what is now being done—physical training, digital self-paced learning, and virtual learning—into one platform. Learners in the metaverse can then experience the real in a digital world, bridging the gap between virtual and real-world experiences.
While the metaverse infrastructure is still being built, academics, instructors, and digital designers have the opportunity to pave the way and implement innovative techniques to combine the actual world with augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences in order to fully realize the metaverse’s potential as a 3D, global, interlinked, interactive and real-time online world.
It’s now possible to escape into a virtual environment (the metaverse) and gain a deeper understanding of real people, places, and events through a more immersive and engaging experience.
The metaverse provides new creative methods for integrating digital learning solutions into a larger ecosystem. The concept of a metaverse — a digital world in which users may connect, cooperate, practice, and solve problems — is excellent for corporate L&D because it provides learners with the tools they need to succeed while also enabling them to direct their own learning. Let us see some of the areas where Metaverse will possibly affect L&D:
1. Conducting training sessions in the Metaverse:Imagine entering a virtual classroom that is not in the real-life universe. Employees from any corner of the world are able to join this room and engage with the rest of the employees and the trainer just as they would in reality. This experience would not be the same as a standard zoom or teams meet, as the holistic, immersive experience in the metaverse would trick our brain into thinking that we are inside a real training.
2. Making simulations incredibly realistic:The existing simulations would be ten times more immersive and realistic in the metaverse, allowing the learners to move beyond understanding and relate to the time and decision-based situations through living that experience. The enhanced hands-on experience will increase the learning efficiency and make the learning more memorable.
3. Enhancing teaching methods:With the emergence of the metaverse, learning is ready to take one step ahead. Imagine going and touring the entire universe 75 million years ago to see and study dinosaurs by watching them; this will be the power of the metaverse. We already are in a “learn by doing” environment; now, we will “learn by living” the experience by virtual immersed in reality through a metaverse.
In comparison, today’s Metaverse is still in the early stages of determining what its learning potential will be in the next few years. However, given the growth of online gaming and virtual reality, the metaverse concept is almost unavoidable. Immersive learning and gamification are becoming commonplace in corporate learning and development methods worldwide. The metaverse risk for L&D is that we seize an opportunity to create true virtual classrooms, and the opportunity is that we make better use of the new capabilities, allowing us to communicate and collaborate more quickly, taking us beyond any training room.
The effectiveness of L&D in the metaverse is due to the fact that it provides all of the benefits of digital learning — flexibility, “datafication,” and virtual collaboration — without any of the disadvantages that previously separated the virtual from reality. Due to the epidemic, all firms have used digital solutions to improve team communication and training while working from remote areas. The Metaverse’s use of cutting-edge technology like augmented reality and virtual reality to recreate real-life-like immersive training experiences provides a strong foundation for its acceptance in the industry. As a result, it’s no wonder that the metaverse has captivated everyone’s interest as a possible future medium.