The future’s virtual;
the future’s a Metaverse

When the English poet William Wordsworth said, “Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future”, we hope he was right. Education, starting out as an interactive exchange between master and apprentice, evolving and growing through books and the written word has, in the last three decades, taken a further epoch-making leap into the unknown through the assistance of the World Wide Web. Under the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, inclusive and equitable quality education is defined as goal number four. Access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities is a key building block of societal resilience and critical for the realisation of long-term sustainable development. It is however also ripe for disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have taken the role of caretaker, provoking a communications and content delivery revolution in education.

An increasingly anachronistic education system

With most education systems across the world being rooted in the European nineteenth century model of three terms (tied to Christian festivals) and a long summer holiday (tied to agricultural labour to support the harvest), such education systems may be regarded as increasingly anachronistic in a twenty-first century technological world. Especially considering agriculture contributed 1.3% to the European economy in 2020, compared to information and communications, which contributed 18%.

In addition, national education systems are historically thought to serve two purposes in modern Europe. The first is cultural and political homogenisation (minimising any negative effects of family background and individual personality) in order to create a national culture, a common understanding of citizenship and a civil society. A good example of this would be Beethoven and Heine’s ‘Ode to Joy’, where “all people will be brothers” (and sisters). A second purpose for having a national education system is to facilitate social stratification, helping ‘sort’ society’s population into its various strata, another throwback to the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s upper, middle and working classes.

Further, with three of the top five wealthiest people on the planet today making their fortunes through information technology (Jeff Bezos with Amazon, Bill Gates with Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook), they significantly challenge these established social hierarchies and strengthen the view of an anachronistic educational structure, based on a system that is ever more at odds with an increasingly technological working world.

Education: the golden ticket

However, there is a tried and tested path through a seemingly old-fashioned way of educating young people: learning. With western European societies having highly comparable distributions of occupations, and all school systems having a compulsory phase, securing the basic skills needed to survive in society with primary, secondary and tertiary phases through more academic or more practical routes, the entrance ticket to the labour market continues to be one’s educational credentials, increasingly through and in information technology.

Technology: social and economic polarisation

Thus, whilst education, essentially rooted in nineteenth century structures and from a technological perspective, increasingly polarised between the economic haves and have-nots, learning in all countries was still viewed as the main route to future success.

Then came COVID.

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed and continues to pose serious issues for global education systems. The need to contain COVID-19 as much as possible has meant the closure of schools in more than 100 countries, affecting over half of the world’s school children and leaving over a billion children out of school.

The cost of this, not only to schools and missed education, but socially and economically, both locally and globally is profound and unparalleled. This negative impact of COVID-19 on education has been shouldered most significantly by the students themselves, through a) a disruption to their learning; b) no, or decreased access to an education, to supportive technologies and research facilities and c) increased student debt for those at university. All this at a school age and educational experience that can never be replaced.

COVID-19 has simply increased the gaps in education for all students, regardless of country and income.

To minimise the negative impact of COVID-19 and the government limitations placed on citizens to remain isolated, students and teachers have had to rely far more on technology to deliver education online. It is unfortunate for some, that they have been hindered by poor infrastructures including sub-optimal networks, inaccessibility, intermittent power and poor digital skills. Furthermore, while the opportunity and ability to access disposable income enabling access to up-to-date technology has had a polarising effect on global education, the pandemic has had no such effect. COVID-19 has increased the gaps in education for all students, regardless of country and income, although it is clear that those with access to better-resourced schools and to technology will have been able to adapt more easily.

For this generation of students, the effect of COVID-19 on education has therefore been reductive (reducing the standard of education for all), rather than simply polarising, although it has served to expose some of the massive disparities that exist in access to health, education and digital employment. The harmful effects of school closures due to COVID-19 include interrupted learning, poorer nutrition, unequal access to digital learning portals, increased pressure on schools to remain open and social isolation.

Thus, the need for all learners regardless of age to adopt technology and improve their digital skills in line with emerging trends is clear. But what if the pace of change in technology outstrips the pace of upskilling our teachers?

Whilst COVID-19 has limited humanity’s ability to travel, to learn, to do business face-to-face, through humanity’s innovative, entrepreneurial spirit, education’s ability to keep pace with technology has significantly increased. To this end, COVID-19 may just have helped produce the lifeboat to education’s survival.

COVID-19 and its influence at individual school level

The perception that COVID-19 has had a solely negative influence on schools would be inaccurate. Empirical research by Michael Harpham with six secondary schools in the UK, suggests that COVID-19 has influenced all schools in some way and has had both a negative and positive influence. These influences include developing staff teamwork and team strengths, increasing organisational communication and helping to enforce necessary organisational change.

However, through COVID-19, regular organisational habits were challenged. Some routines changed for the better, improving student behaviour, work and student outcomes. For example, one participant in the research observed “if we’re talking about COVID-19 opportunities, everybody’s far more visible around the site and for me it’s no accident that behaviour has improved because of that”. COVID-19 also created an opportunity to reflect and increase control, meaning a more effective running of the school and therefore less workload for staff. Changes through COVID-19 also required increased diplomacy with others, which was exhausting for the staff, but also created improvements and respite (e.g., parents managing the students, not the staff), creating a better school atmosphere / sense of wellbeing.

The future of education: An era of digital education is born?

Looking to the future of education and the extent to which trends in education mirror trends in business, we are facing a warp speed shift in how we educate our future generations. Kate Anckethill of innovation consultants, GDR Creative Intelligence, thinks that products such as Amazon Explore, Tao Bao, Ali Baba and the move to 5G communications in industry are paving the way for a global move for all of us to the ‘Metaverse’.

The Metaverse is a virtual world co-existing in reality. In this virtual world there are virtual concerts attended by thousands of virtual avatar fans and virtual libraries visited by thousands of virtual readers. The opportunity is here to virtually shop, for virtually anything, virtually anywhere.

As a result, the technological gauntlet has been thrown down to traditional methods of teaching and learning in schools. The ability to create global schools giving global lessons using technology to virtually attend anywhere is here, now. The four corners of the classroom have been torn down to be replaced by the four corners of a computer screen, technology being used to translate and re-translate languages, education being able to be delayed and distributed at the student’s convenience, enabling teachers to teach anywhere, at any time. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also sadly highlighted how children are often among the most impacted by major displacements. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in June that nearly two out of every three children in Ukraine had been displaced by the conflict, so understanding what role technology can play in helping them recover some of their lost educational requirements in the future is paramount.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also sadly highlighted how children are often among the most impacted by major displacements. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in June that nearly two out of every three children in Ukraine had been displaced by fighting, so understanding what role technology can play in helping them recover some of their lost educational requirements in the future is paramount.

Global educational innovations to watch include:

However, there has to be a note of caution here. The metaverse, this virtual world, is an unregulated one, a Wild West of a World Wide Web. We may be inspired by Captain Kirk to “boldly go where no man has gone before”, but in the real world, there is a dynamic tension between the visceral and the virtual; between the necessity to make money, to have the necessities and the luxuries, and the virtual world of digital communication and interaction.

The metaverse, this virtual world, is an unregulated one, a Wild West of a World Wide Web.

The vision of this new age is an egalitarian and an exciting one: where everyone can be who they want to be; shop where they want to shop and experience a brave new (educational) world as equals. But this is still a vision. The reality is that this vision can only be experienced by those that can afford to have such a vision. For others, such equality is too expensive. Whilst education can be accessed anytime, anywhere by the few; like pharmaceuticals, like transport and like accommodation, the metaverse of education in the future could remain inaccessible to the many.

But to return to Wordsworth, just like pharmaceuticals, transport and accommodation, when we are able to provide education efficiently for all, not just the few, we will have learned lessons from the past, facilitating a global education system in the present that really does educate and enable the many to have better lives and a brighter future. FW