Since the popularity of the Internet, the boundary of the abstract concept is being opened up by mankind: we have created various virtual spaces with computers, smart phones and other terminals as carriers, such as social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D world, augmented reality applications and so on. Now, the emergence of the metaverse is injecting new imagination into the society. What new images will it bring to students, teachers and even the whole industry?
From Virtual Campus to "Meta Campus"
Virtual campus construction has been widely promoted as an important part of campus informatization. 3D virtual campus has become an indispensable and important column of many school portal websites, which plays a more and more important role in school image, enrollment publicity and information management.
New York University in the United States developed relevant applications in 2015, which allows users to browse the virtual panorama of the New York University campus through AR, and each floor of the teaching building is marked with its own functional division. In 2020, under the influence of the epidemic, this world's top university also gave a VR online graduation ceremony----Grad Alley, to graduates who were affected by the Covid-19. Students could choose their own characters and take pictures together.
Coincidentally, a team of over 100 students from the University of California at Berkeley formed a virtual Berkeley campus in the video game Minecraft, restoring every scene of the school. In the graduation season, students of the university can also create roles and participate in the graduation ceremony, including receiving graduation clothes, listening to speeches by the president and special guests, and throwing away bachelor's hats.
Obviously, it doesn't seem to be a new thing to reproduce the real school environment and let users experience the campus atmosphere.
"Meta campus"----an imagination that combines the metaverse with the education industry and is likely to be realized in the future is gradually becoming a reality. It can not only realize the true 1:1 environmental reproduction by using more complex modeling, mapping, light and shadow technologies, but also allow students and teachers to enter the virtual space through wearing VR glasses and other devices to carry out a series of classroom activities that can only be completed offline.
"Meta campus" is not only the extension of the real campus in the virtual space, but also the virtual real integration of software and hardware by connecting the online virtual campus platform and various offline AIoT systems. In this process, the online daily educational activities of students and teachers will form a good closed loop and self-contained system on the one hand, and can intersect with offline teaching on the other hand.
Li Zhimin, former director of Science and Technology Development Center of Ministry of Education and vice president of Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy, believes that the metaverse is a great development and high-order form of the Internet, marking the initial stage of human beings entering digital civilization and information civilization. As an immersive virtual space, the core of metaverse lies in the carrying of digital assets and digital identity. For metaverse education, educational resources will become a very important part.
Perhaps in the near future, the educational resources in the metaverse will be jointly created by PGC, UGC and even AIGC under the values of co-creation, sharing and co-governance, allowing students to learn courses from all over the world. Scholars in the real world as educators of the metaverse anytime and anywhere, and work with developers to customize personalized teaching models for students. Students are no longer limited to a single entity university, but flock to the metaverse education platform with unlimited resources. The unique identity authentication system formed by using blockchain and other technologies can make each student's study and life synchronize, leave footprints in the metaverse and map to real teaching activities.
Expectation to Break from Traditional Education
The speed of scientific and technological progress is surpassing the evolution speed of the education system, and the cycle of the birth, diffusion and extinction of new knowledge and technology is accelerating to get shorter. The information explosion makes both the educational subject and the traditional educational paradigm face new challenges. Zhu Jiaming, economist and chairman of the Academic and Technical Committee of Hengqin Data Link Digital Finance Research Institute, believes that "In the past, learning was for creation, but now the process of learning itself is creation, and the metaverse can break the time and space boundaries of education, realize the upgrading of traditional education mode and the balance of teaching resources, and finally make lifelong learning, interdisciplinary learning, circular learning and mutual learning between man and machine possible."
The virtual teaching space based on AR / VR technology has been preliminarily used in practical teaching activities. In the United States, game company Roblox has created a project with a fund of about US $10 million, which is specially used to create a 3D multi-person interactive teaching space and enable the online teaching of higher education and vocational education.
It is reported that the company's goal is to cover 100 million students worldwide in the next 10 years. Rebecca Kantar, the company's education director, also sees the platform as an ideal teaching space where students from all over the world can achieve real time collaboration in scientific experiments.
In some industries with high operation difficulty coefficient and expensive experimental equipment, the landing of metaverse is particularly urgent. For example, the application of metaverse in physics, chemistry, biology and other experimental and demonstrative disciplines can bring more imagination to these disciplines by building a virtual teaching environment and giving birth to new educational and teaching methods such as virtual lesson preparation, virtual teaching and virtual examination.
Hao Jingfang, a writer who won the 74th Hugo Award, believes that in the field of vocational education, metaverse may provide a more efficient matching path between people and occupation. This trend may bring new development possibilities to the professional construction of vocational education.
Integration with education has been considered as one of the most important and feasible application scenarios of the metaverse. Wu Yinghui, president of Institute of Educational Sciences in Beijing Haidian District, said that with the unification of national curriculum standards, the goal and direction of educational reform are highly clear, and the educational and teaching methods show a diversified development trend. The combination of virtual and real digital learning scene and highly interactive learning methods created by metaverse will stimulate students' enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge to a great extent.
In her opinion, the development of virtual human technology is promoting the birth of virtual teachers, so as to improve the quality of companion learning and make up for the emotional lack of online learning interaction. Highly simulated man-machine interactive learning and accompanying learning may become an important direction of educational reform.
Wu Yinghui also mentioned that under the existing class teaching management system, students have obvious individual differences. Metaverse education allows customized and personalized personal learning space, and provides a metaverse learning and growth plan to adapt to each student's psychological characteristics and thinking habits, so as to truly "teach students according to their aptitude". She hopes that in the near future, metaverse technology can create an educational practice scene integrating virtuality and reality, and promote the reform and development of educational methods as soon as possible.
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The recently unveiled "Metaverse Comprehensive Research Report" believes that the core of the metaverse is to regard the immersive Internet as a huge, unified, lasting and shared field.
The report jointly released by the world's top universities such as University of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and London’s Global University tells us that although the metaverse may look futuristic driven by emerging technologies such as extended reality, 5G and artificial intelligence, the data explosion in cyberspace is not far away.
