Can Gaming and Sports Inform Higher Ed Metaverse Uptake?

Alexander Lee reports on DIGIDAY that higher ed has a long way to go before it truly enters the metaverse – but the first steps are intriguing.

Writes Lee:

“Virtual education has become the norm during the COVID-19 pandemic, and educators have struggled to recreate the experience of in-person classes via video-chatting platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Students have complained about Zoom fatigue, and some teachers have reported that they feel like they are speaking into a void. Perhaps most importantly, the casual social interactions inherent to in-person schooling vanished from the standard collegiate experience during the transition to online classes.

Launch House, a California-based community and residency program for startup founders and engineers, is all about bringing people together. Co-founder Brett Goldstein sees the company’s shared houses as opportunities for both traditional education — in the form of talks and meet-and-greets with Silicon Valley leaders — and the sort of casual, but entrepreneurial brainstorming that led to the foundation of companies such as Meta and Microsoft. “There’s a reason why three out of the six most valuable companies in the world were started in dorm rooms, right? And it’s because people were surrounded by tons of ideas, super inspired during unstructured time,” Goldstein said. “So that’s basically why IRL [education] works, and the important thing about the metaverse is that it can unlock that.”

Read Lee’s full story, Educators look to use metaverse platforms to bring serendipity to remote schooling, by clicking here.