Tag Archives: Online Learning

How Can Higher Education Institutions Benefit from the Metaverse?

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What are some possibilities which the metaverse can offer to colleges and universities? It can serve to recruit students and many other things. Swinburne University of Technology, an Australian institution, already uses the metaverse in some way.

For some insight into how institutions of higher learning can gain from the metaverse, let’s meet Christina Yan Zhang, PhD, founder and CEO of The Metaverse Institute. A former international student. Zhang started research on the metaverse in 2005 while studying for her master’s degree. Her dissertation was mainly about the metaverse’s use in developing international strategies for universities.

Zhang later studied for her PhD which was mainly about the metaverse. During that time, she served as Loughborough Student Union’s first international development officer. In 2022, she started the Metaverse Institute. It assists a variety of organizations ranging from governmental to institutional investors in identifying how they match up to the metaverse and devises frameworks to start using the technology to reach their goals.

Zhang’s next ambition is towards institutions of higher learning. According to Zhang, “We can really use the next generation of the internet to help improve the Real world,” Apart from serving to recruit students, Zhang is of the opinion that the metaverse can possibly alter education outright by giving an “immersive, interactive and intuitive user interface” which will see learning pivot towards being more “bottom-up”. Read more here.

The Use of Micro- Credentials in A Pandemic

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The United States education system is dealing with change and an uncertain future. Everyone including educators, college students, and parents has to deal with reshuffles.  They will face more reshuffling as the COVID -19 pandemic persists. However, certain endemic elements of the education system will persist. They mirror the architecture of the educational framework and foster the environment for learning to happen. Students must step into an educational atmosphere that encourages continual scholarly activity.

Each classroom reflects the uniqueness of the teacher who leads it. Such uniqueness shows up in the manner in which the educators construct their learning atmosphere and impart knowledge into learners. When educators encounter difficulties or worrying situations that impede learning and student achievement, they pinpoint remedies.
The charm of micro-credentials lies in their capacity to enable educators to broaden and apply remedies to problems or worrying situations encountered within schools and classrooms. As micro-credentials are earned on demand or virtually, they are well suited for Professional Development (PD) amidst a pandemic. The Clark County Educational Association (CCEA) in Nevada put out three amounts of micro-credentials and has devised a way of acknowledging their teachers who earn them. For further reading from the original post see here.