New technologies are transforming education as well as other areas of our lives. For example, the Metaverse market is expected to reach over $900 billion by 2030 and the AI education market to surpass $20 billion by 2027. Undoubtedly, Metaverse is a major step toward the new types of socio economic relationships we’ll be forming in digital environments and the activities we’ll be undertaking.
NOVA is one of the pioneering companies enabling new opportunities for virtual interactions. NOVA’s vision is to transform education through an immersive, mixed-reality learning experience. While we often associate education with in-class learning at a brick-and-mortar school, learning is essentially a lifelong, never-ending process that starts the day we’re born. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the education sector, learning is essentially a survival skill. We all not only experience learning, but we indisputably need it in order to progress. In NOVA’s eyes, education is not a sector; it’s society’s foundation, a key driver for progression, and life philosophy. NOVA’s team believes that society needs to have the right tools to maximize human potential.
While today’s learners already have access to a variety of online learning resources like videos, pre-recorded online courses, and Zoom classes, a fundamental question remains: Is that enough?
Team NOVA, composed of educators and tech entrepreneurs from Stanford and Berkeley University, Jean Arnaud, Michaela Jamelska, Patricia Jamelska, has collected evidence from these kinds of classes to answer this question, and the answer is a resounding “No.” While we personalize everything from monogramming our handbags to customizing orders on food-delivery apps, we tend to forget about the importance of personalization within the learning realm.
Students are studying the way generations 50 years ago used to study, and they often use out-of-date textbooks in the classroom. Updating textbooks can be a cost-prohibitive and time-consuming process for educational institutions, which is why they rarely do it. Additionally, the new Zoom format that came as a consequence of the pandemic is often boring for students, and teachers lose students’ attention quickly. Students often play games on the side to pass the class time, as the school day often seems to them like a long, educational video.
Discoveries, progress, and innovation are happening at such a fast pace that traditional resources just cannot keep up. So one may wonder in what capacity the Metaverse might be able to transform education for a significantly better learning experience.
While NOVA understands the Metaverse’s importance and benefits, it doesn’t focus exclusively on it. NOVA’s solution is a mixed reality, where educational institutions can switch between new formats of learning. With this solution, NOVA doesn’t seek to remove a human experience (teachers) from the learning process. On the contrary, it strengthens an instructor’s role by providing extra resources to conduct teaching in the most immersive and enriching format. Furthermore, in today’s world of everyone-doing-everything, we face the risk of being taught unverified knowledge by those who are not entitled to teach. NOVA’s mission is to protect against that risk and ensure that competence stays within an educational setting.
NOVA ensures that students can be creators and active participants in classes. Its Metaverse solution provides them with hands-on learning tools that allow them to do things like reposition planets in solar systems, open the planet Earth to see what’s inside, or visit (or even try to build!) the Colosseum. Metaverse offers learners the opportunity to become active creators rather than passive consumers of information and technology. Last year, Dr. Karlsson Wirebring and fellow researchers published a study that supports what many already suspected: Students learn better when they figure things out on their own, as opposed to being told what to do. Learning through creating, which Metaverse allows, will help them develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and project management skills as well as self-confidence and other attributes essential for future leaders.
Metaverse will also allow for more transdisciplinary learning, as it allows the possibility of building custom-made, virtual environments with needed elements to intersect disciplines. Learners often experience more profound learning when they start to think outside the box, collaborate, and analyze the same subjects across various disciplines. Students will be able to utilize multiple disciplines to begin developing solutions to ambitious and bold problems in a virtual world, which will deepen their understanding of multiple perspectives.
All in all, the possibilities of advancing education to facilitate learning for not only current but also future generations are endless. NOVA will introduce a new, improved, and more efficient way of absorbing information in today’s information-savy world. Our virtual environments will become a building block for the next century’s possibilities.
