Students’ Perception of Metaverses for Online Learning in Higher Education: Hype or Hope?

Online learning environments have been widely adopted, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, their usage is envisioned for multiple teaching scenarios, including international courses involving students from different locations. However, as e-learning frameworks lack many advantages of p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Electronics (Basel) 2023-04, Vol.12 (8), p.1867
Main Authors: Rojas, Elisa, Hülsmann, Xenia, Estriegana, Rosa, Rückert, Frank, Garcia-Esteban, Soraya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Beliefs, opinions and attitudes
Colleges & universities
COVID-19
Design
Distance learning
Engineering education
Higher education institutions
Online education
Online instruction
Perception
Students
Teaching
Virtual worlds
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Summary:Online learning environments have been widely adopted, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, their usage is envisioned for multiple teaching scenarios, including international courses involving students from different locations. However, as e-learning frameworks lack many advantages of physical interaction, diverse technologies to enhance the learning experience in this regard, including the use of metaverses, are currently in demand. In this study, we implemented an educational metaverse platform for engineering courses at four different European Universities from Poland, Portugal, Germany, and Spain, then had it quantitatively evaluated by students from these higher education institutions. The obtained results illustrate positive student perceptions of its ease of use, satisfaction and fun, and immersion, although their opinions with respect to learning experience and usefulness are less clear. The students seem to agree that interactivity remains insufficient in comparison with face-to-face teaching. For this reason, we provide an examination other related works and finalize this article by suggesting future research directions in the field.
ISSN:2079-9292
2079-9292
DOI:10.3390/electronics12081867