Good Practices
Metaverse in a virtual teaching and learning environment

How Metaverse with VR brings virtual teaching and learning new opportunities

Background

EDA6038 School Improvement Institute II: Virtual Leadership

Topic: Provocation 4: Metaverse experiences

Design target: To enhance students’ understanding of virtual leadership and learning through the exploration of cutting-edge technologies

👩‍🏫 Online

⏰ 30 mins

🎓 38 students

ANALYSIS

Intended learning outcomes:

To understand the characteristics and importance of virtual leadership;
To apply problem-solving skills to address challenging issues of implementing new technologies;
To reflect on the process of learning and increase awareness of supporting students’ learning and catering for learner diversity

Challenges:

Technology - It may take some time for most students to access and implement the assigned tasks with novel technology; the brand-new metaverse experience requires both reliable facilities, stable wifi network connection, and strong technical support to proceed smoothly.

Pedagogy - It may be difficult and demanding to design and implement engaging and collaborative metaverse activities in a synchronous online lesson.

Space - It may be difficult to create a virtual teaching and learning environment that accommodates all the remote students and instructors; only a physical space equipped with all the necessary facilities would make the virtual experience possible.

CO-DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Our solution:

To provide comprehensive support, especially in terms of technology and space.

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IMPLEMENTATION (Click to enlarge)

Before lesson

Setting up the spaces

⏰ ~A week (asynchronous)
📖 Productive learning
🤝 I/TA

Virtual spaces: The instructor, TA or with co-collaborative team set up virtual teaching and learning spaces. In this course, a virtual lecture hall was created to bring all the students and instructors together. In the hall, there is a whiteboard displaying the learning objectives. Besides, an art gallery was established for the students to accomplish the tasks assigned.

ePS: Before the lesson, the project team helped to set up the physical space with the instructors and TA. All the audio and visual equipment, as well as VR headsets were tested.

Technology:

VR

Spatial

EVALUATION

Instuctor’s reflective comments:

I designed this module of the course together with the other course instructor Dr. Darren Bryant, our department technology support expert Mr. Oscar Lo, and the ePS support team. We were stimulated by several recent metaverse seminars and events, and started to think about using the metaverse as an opportunity to address the new topic on virtual leadership and add a new enhancing element to one of our most demanding classrooms. We managed to exchange ideas with a team of expert provider in the field, and then further explored different platforms. The final delivery approach was the product of continuous discussion and revision among our team.

Our primary goal was to engage participants with authentic, meaningful virtual experiences in a real metaverse. We wish to avoid orally explaining what the metaverse is and ‘lecturing’ about their possible implications for future learning and leadership practices to the course participants. The participants are international school leaders and active professional learners. Drawing on the broadened horizon of experiences and cognition, the participants would be able to naturally think, question, make connections to their school context, and come up with more nuanced understanding of prospective challenges and opportunities to lead increasingly virtual school context.

Dr LU, Jiafang [EPL], course instructor