Education in the metaverse will be more democratised, the academic curriculum will be more equitable and open.
duPhonics is the telenanny platform for life literacy that offers immersive childhood experiences through learning in the metaverse. This analysis presents a foresight into the future of childhood education in the post-pandemic world.
COVID-19 has changed the lifestyle of modern outlook on work, health, and living for global society; many employed parents, in particular, the pandemic has brought additional burden as many schools and child care facilities were closed during the lockdown.
Several childcare businesses remain closed because of the economic hardship, and many educational institutions have turned to a hybrid online and offline model as a temporary solution.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, educators and children alike have faced new challenges of adapting to work-life balance exacerbated in the professional domain with remote work and learning. Video conferencing ushered both the work and education landscape and turned on its head in full swing during the pandemic lockdowns.
Even with ease in restrictions for offline gathering and returning to the workplace, the fundamentals of teacher-student interaction and keeping students engaged have evolved to the online market.
In the era of Zoom fatigue, winner like Outschool proves that online learning is not a fad that will recede into the background amid the inflation crisis and rampant shortages in manpower of educators around the world in this post covid scenario. Hybrid learning is the key to supplementing education for the future.
Zoom fatigue syndrome
The learning efficacy could be supplemented online, and many might doubt the learning outcome because of the return to offline schooling. Both impacts of the online and hybrid models will be an ongoing observational experiment in the post-pandemic environment.
However, one buzzword remains with those who shared an extended hours on remote learning, Zoom fatigue. The tiredness, worry, and burnout associated with the overuse of virtual online communication, particularly video meetings, are evident.
The minds are together, but bodies are not; dislocated cognitive dissonance causes conflictual feelings, which are exhausting to virtually connected users.
Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor with INSEAD, suggests Zoom fatigue originates from people’s need to focus more on non-verbal cues such as pitch and tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.
The mental strain requires the brain to work much harder than it would offline. Participants have to use extra cognitive energy to recognise non-verbal cues, which are difficult to gauge because the environment is not shared. Children are no exception to the cognitive dissonance that impacts their learning experience through many hours of lectures or playtime with video conferencing.
Telenanny in the metaverse
duPhonics anticipates this issue of cognitive dissonance of extended usage of video calls, so the company has developed a virtual reality platform during Q4 of 2021 and launched the PlaySpace metaverse in January 2022 to explore the economic opportunities with the telenanny model in the digitised spatial environment for children.
Immersive learning provides an instant contextual learning experience that would enhance both academic understanding and cognitive engagement. The company found a new revenue model that was viable and engaging with students while parents entrusted safety and privacy in a new space unique from the traditional videoconferencing.
The combination of virtual and offline experience that merges in a third space does not necessarily belong to work or play but is both stated by sociologist Ray Oldenburg.
The metaverse experience will simplify learning of complex processes in science, engineering, and mathematics. For example, a tutor could show their students life on Mars.
The instructor could take the students to a virtual Mars habitat and display the principles of how to survive outside of Earth with models of solar panels, waste recycling machines, the habitats for the astronauts, and the surface of Mars.
The relevance of theories learned in school take on new meaning while also allowing educators the chance to bridge gaps in the theory-to-action steps that have been a tedious preparation of lectures, presentations, and model experiments in the classroom.
Students will benefit from real-time and accessible learning objects on demand. This will end the problem of outdated curriculums in textbooks and lectures. The distribution of hands-on knowledge where learners could interact with the educators in the metaverse would liberate the downloading of information to children at a pace that they haven’t seen before since the advent of the world wide web.
Forbes offered a glimpse of the metaverse as a likely media to fully support augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the connectivity to link all worlds.
Anyone will have the opportunity to create a space and be part of a user-generated global community on an omnipresent multiplatform where they can share their games or goods with the world. The 5G internet speed proliferation should allow this to be a reality.
Future educational impact
The impact of services rendered and the outcome of learners will undoubtedly change education systems across the world because the metaverse will allow anything to become a learning opportunity.
Complex subjects such as history, science, and geography will not be just flat illustrations on screen hindering the learning experience. The metaverse will allow students to experience elements of these subjects in detail never before achieved.
With the new approach to education, the value of childhood education will undoubtedly exponentially increase in revenue with the digital transformation of education itself.
In summary, education in the metaverse content will be more democratised. The educators will become the content creators and vice versa. The academic curriculum will be more equitable and open.
The Alpha Generation of learners will create demand, take more ownership of their education as experience and actively seek ways to collect experiences as units of knowledge.
Source: e27
