If there’s one thing that conceptually describes technological development really well, it’s innovation. But it’s also about disruption, or the ability to come up with scenarios that are totally remote – and sometimes contrary – to the norm. Technology has been transforming the sectors that are the engines of social change, especially economic change, for decades now. But as we’ve already explored, ICT and mobile connectivity can positively affect all sectors, including education.

Another feature of the digital transition is that it never ends. And the next step is the metaverse. While the world of education has been experimenting with virtual environments for almost thirty years now, and these experiences have yielded positive results, they’re rarely extrapolated to the entire system. Perhaps developing educational strategies to work out how to get into the metaverse on the right footing could lead to that all-important paradigm shift for the sector, especially in early years education.

How can the metaverse benefit the education sector

What will characterise the fully developed metaverse is its immersive potential from the user’s point of view, alongside a high degree of ‘experientiality’, albeit through avatars rather than direct interaction with the body or one of our five senses. Teachers and students alike will be able to immerse themselves in a non-physical ecosystem where they can explore and benefit from various methodologies where the first-person experience can add real value. Some examples include:

• virtual visits to places of interest and museums;
• attending concerts for educational purposes;
• direct interaction with guest speakers and teachers remotely;
• immersive recreations of relevant historical events and time periods;
• cultural and learning exchanges with students from other countries;
• and much more besides.

In fact, educational institutions would even be able to recreate digital replicas of their entire campus in the metaverse, with all their facilities including classrooms, common rooms, dining rooms, recreational spaces… The idea would be to replicate the exact experience that face-to-face students get, adding the same quality and prestige of each organisation to online educational content, while expanding their geographic range to achieve global reach.

The metaverse and early years education. Opportunities and challenges.

A number of studies by experts in teaching and education show that applying virtual reality and augmented reality to early years education improves results in a statistically significant way. This is the case when taking on board concepts such as space, distance, texture, colour and volume, and when internalising and replicating skills and tools related to artistic expression, as well as when learning simple mathematical concepts through their graphic representation, to name just a few examples. The metaverse could represent a significant improvement in these types of educational applications.

Despite the enormous possibilities of the metaverse, its effective application in environments such as early years education will still have to overcome certain hurdles. Some are more general and relate to infrastructure, i.e. the ability to access adequate bandwidth for the high demand for data transmission in the metaverse, reducing the price of equipment needed to get into the metaverse, as well as technological standardisation to apply it in educational settings with limited resources.

Other problems might affect students at this particular stage of their education more specifically. This is the case when designing devices to facilitate immersive experiences over several hours without causing physical discomfort, as well as avoiding some of the potential pitfalls of using virtual environments like the metaverse intensively without affecting perception of space, distance or the ability to develop an appreciation for depth of field, for example.

In any case, the educational sector has always been a pioneer in terms of applying and making use of technological advances to push practices further. What’s certain is that the metaverse will soon be among this long list of successes in the technological transition.