Metaverse as a Learning Environment for Blended Teaching

Abstract

COVID-19 motivated profound transformations in the educational field, accelerating the use of new technologies for teaching and learning. Teachers and students were forced to attend remote environments, adapting education practices to these contexts. With the gradual return to face-to-face activities after the critical period of the pandemic, teachers and students faced the growth of a challenging environment, blended teaching and learning. In this context, the use of technologies such as metaverse rises as a natural approach to blended teaching and learning once they propose the extension of the real world to virtual worlds. This paper aims to present the use of a metaverse as a learning environment for blended teaching. Through a quasi-experimental study in a class in an undergraduate degree, students evaluate it considering their perceptions and motivation to use the metaverse as a learning environment in a blended context. As a result, identified positive evidence was identified that students felt the metaverse was a suitable learning environment for blended teaching and also that it provided motivation to students to carry out the proposed didactic activities. Therefore, from lessons learned from the pandemic, this research brought a significant contribution by presenting an approach of using metaverses as learning environments to support blended teaching necessities.