Education in the Metaverse: Amidst the Virtual and Reality

In the past year the word “metaverse” seems to have become ever more present in an array of publications and projects in different fields spanning from economics, psychology, education, and philosophy to engineering and computer sciences. The founder of Meta has claimed that the metaverse is the future of internet and has described it as “a set of virtual spaces which you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you […] it will be an embodied internet operated by many different players in a decentralized way”. During the Meta Connect conference in October 2022, Microsoft announced their collaboration with Meta for the development of Microsoft Teams Mesh to bring Teams into the metaverse. In addition, Meta has launched Horizon Workspace, Zoom has created Zoom VR, there are different releases of Moodle VR, Google AR/VR division is working on features of Workspace for Virtual Reality whereas the majority of Learning Management Apps have already developed features and versions for VR or for metaverse. This massive use of Extended Reality (with the metaverse or with other similar technologies) will have a high impact on the way we teach today and in the future. To date, it seems that we do not have sufficient lexis to analyze the implications of the use of this kind of technology in relation to teaching learning processes, and in this perspective simplex didactics seems to offer a possible path to initiate this debate.