Instructional Design in the Metaverse Part 1 Introduction
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The promise of the metaverse in education is like a mirage in the desert. Educators seem to be forever anticipating the arrival of the metaverse but still not yet embracing it.
However, this waiting time has not been without value as solid research foundations have been built. In an article titled “The Hottest Job in Higher Education: Instructional Designer”, Decherney and Levander asserted that as instructional designers (IDs) have become the “sherpas of online learning teams, experts in how to teach and design a course” (2020, para. 5).
It follows that instructional designers will be the experts by reading research and determining the best route to the metaverse promise.
This article series intends to provide guidance for instructional designers entering this new and rapidly changing space by straddling between what is known and unknown in instructional design in the metaverse. Early research that addresses the metaverse “tends to focus on outcomes-based research while neglecting the important details of how something was accomplished” (Beck, Morgado, & O’Shea, 2023, p. 1). Studies can also target emergent cause-and-effect or comparison relationships and ignore known educational practices and principles. Quests can contain grand promises, spurring a rush to implement, followed by unmet hopes and expectations (Mayer, 2020, p. 13). If administrators determine that the metaverse does contain unmet hopes, future funding for uses that truly could change education for the better will dry up.
After this first Introduction section, the second of eight sections will examine research myths in the educational metaverse. These myths include that the metaverse will cause more learning at a faster rate and reach learners in new ways. I will look closely at what the research currently says for and against seven specific claims. In the third section, I will look at what the research is pointing to as characteristics of success when considering the incorporation and implementation of the metaverse. The characteristics do not seem to arrive in popular metaverse claims, but like the slow and steady tortoise, they seem to predict the winners of the race. In Sections 4 and 5, I will cover the detailed work of instructional design, targeting especially what we already know about multimedia learning and what will be uncovered in the metaverse. Section 6 will discuss the current limitations of using research to drive instructional design in the metaverse. Finally, Sections 7 and 8 are written to leave the reader with hope and soaring possibilities in mind. Because instructional design in the metaverse is an emergent topic, some discoveries are yet to arrive to their eureka moments; those will fall completely outside of our prediction. Thus, this series will have 8 sections but innumerable (until it is done) parts.
Approach
This article series explores the topic with an evidence-based learner-centric approach. That approach fits best for instructional design, a discipline that considers the learning needs of the learner first and foremost. This chapter does not support the use of the metaverse in education for the sake of the cross or extended reality (XR) technology itself, which could be considered a technology-centered approach (Mayer, 2020).
Instead, metaverse solutions should be selected when they are best fit for the instructional situation at hand. In many cases, they will be. But in some cases, they will not.
This series strives to illuminate the characteristics and conditions to consider while keeping the learner and not the technology in the center of focus.
While maintaining that learner focus, this series will use several vocabulary terms and acronyms. Terms such as metaverse, cross reality, or extended reality (XR) will be used interchangeably to refer to the entire technological incorporation. However, this author will use XR to refer more often to the technologies, i.e. hardware and software (Ziker, Truman, & Dodds, 2021), and metaverse to refer to a computer-mediated experience whether it is a game, application, or platform. Two-dimensional (2D) experiences, including monitors and simulations, will often be juxtaposed with three-dimensional (3D) experiences, including headsets or the immersive web (WebXR). The terms instructional design (ID) and instructional designers (IDs) are only separated by the discipline of how people learn and how to design instruction to help that process versus being the one who practices it. Nevertheless, popular terms like learning experience design (LXD) and learning experience designers (LXDs) convey equivalent meaning to aims and mission of instructional design. This chapter will refer to any planned 3D educational interactions as experiences. Indeed, the wide variety of vocabulary and terms is “a characteristic of the early evolution of a branch of technology” (Dodds, 2021, para. 5).
Part 2 will cover my theoretical basis and scope.
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This article is simultaneously published on LinkedIn articles here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/instructional-design-metaverse-part-1-heather-dodds-ph-d-/