Digital Twins and E-Learning: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) has gained significant traction over the last decade, and it has been defined many times from different perspectives by the academy and industry communities. Although DTs are widely used in e.g. manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, their potential applications will soon extend and cover other domains. In this scenario, education is required to play a major role in building its own DT models for purposes ranging from academic to professional training. The DT technology in the education context is expected to enhance the outcomes and scopes of the standard digital e-learning approaches. A particular aspect of the research includes how the DT concept can be transferred over to e-learning and its technology adjusted for a virtual to virtual model. Furthermore, DT is a unique phenomenon, often misinterpreted, that need to be well-defined within a proper framework. In this work, we present the architecture of a Prototypical Digital Twin architecture and explain the importance of defining a framework for a DT-Learning concept.