The metaverse has now become part of new innovative teaching aids in pharmacology classrooms at the University of Sharjah (UoS) in the United Arab Emirates.

The digitization of classrooms at the UoS is evolving as the metaverse is applied to education. The Corona pandemic ushered in a new digital hybrid era in distance learning, but the metaverse promises fully immersive educational settings.

“The metaverse enables the learners and educators to interact in an almost live and natural manner which removes the physical barriers associated with online and distance learning," said Dr. Ahmed Alhusban, Associate Professor at the UoS.

According to Dr. Alhusban, the field of pharmacology involves practitioners' ability to visualize or imagine a sequence of events and the different mediators associated with it.

“There is a real need to have a tool that can present pharmacology in a 3D interactive manner as the tools that currently exist are generally two dimensional and unable to show how sequences and mediators interact with each other," he said.

The college has evaluated the effect of metaverse-based education on the learning, knowledge retention, and satisfaction of students. It has a strong technological infrastructure in place, including high speed Internet and access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies.

In classrooms at the College of Pharmacy, students are introduced to VR-based learning systems using their mobile phones or through VR headsets. Additionally, they learn through 3D animation models of pharmacological agents and their receptors that are created using specific software.

Dr. Alhusban has found that students taught using the metaverse had better knowledge retention and required shorter periods of time to complete exams as compared to students taught in a regular classroom setting.

“Additionally, they showed higher satisfaction and expressed their preference to have more lectures using the metaverse," he said.

Metaverse technologies are endowed with great potential and are redefining education and creating new opportunities for bringing geographically dispersed teachers and students together.

Meantime, academic research has demonstrated that introducing the metaverse in the classroom can enhance learning outcomes.

However, Dr. Alhusban stressed the importance of further research to explore how best to apply virtual learning in classrooms traditionally accustomed to face-to-face contact, which education scholars believe to still be important for comprehensive education.

“This application is still new, and we are among the first in the world to systematically apply and assess the metaverse in education. We expect that using the metaverse will improve the learning and increase its efficiency," he said.

Despite its advantages, the metaverse is still a topic keenly debated by critical and communication pedagogy scholars. The debate has sparked off questions on whether introducing the technology into education will have the capacity to compensate for the benefits that have accompanied traditional physical classrooms.

Dr. Alhusban, while promoting the metaverse as an effective teaching tool, urges caution as educators need to create a situation they can control and deal with all its aspects as they emerge rather than respond to them after they had happened.

Dr. Alhusban, while promoting the metaverse as an effective teaching tool, urges caution as educators need to create a situation they can control and deal with all its aspects as they emerge rather than respond to them after they had happened.