10. Face to the future

Online Education + Metaverse

In the course of future development which is our phase 3 development, Academic Labs will gradually improve the metaverse in the virtual world from four aspects: immersive learning of explicit knowledge, direct absorption of tacit knowledge, research-oriented space for knowledge creation, and virtualized space for knowledge sharing. The exploration and development of application scenarios in the transfer of educational knowledge is also the current mainstream direction of metaverse education.

The concept of the Metaverse was first proposed in Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel "Snow Crash" in 1992. It was described as an independent virtual world parallel to reality, which could be accessed through wearable devices connected to a terminal. Thirty years later, the sandbox gaming platform Roblox included the concept of the Metaverse in its IPO prospectus and successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, bringing widespread attention to the concept. On October 28, 2021, Facebook announced a name change to Meta, reflecting the enormous impact that the Metaverse will have on various sectors of society. The Metaverse will also bring about significant changes in education and knowledge transfer. As early as 2008, Collins boldly predicted that in an era of rapidly advancing computing power, internet access, and speed, virtual reality would have an explosive impact on higher education. Tama and others proposed the construction of a Metaverse learning platform for Japanese language and culture learning, while Ayiter suggested the use of virtual learning environments in art education to facilitate the learning of creative content.

Virtual education is a knowledge-intensive field, containing rich explicit and implicit knowledge. However, various limitations of current online education, such as a lack of immersive experiences, insufficient teacher-student interaction, difficulty in expressing and absorbing implicit knowledge, limited ways to acquire knowledge, and inadequate motivation to learn, resulting in low efficiency of knowledge transfer during online education, and many issues need to be addressed that hinder knowledge transfer. Academic Labs aims to achieve a high degree of compatibility between the Metaverse and virtual education knowledge transfer, enabling the Metaverse to empower practical applications of virtual education in various scenarios, and making breakthroughs in the aforementioned issues.