“At the Edge” of the Metaverse in Teaching and Learning: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

This chapter presents an autoethnographic analysis of our insights as higher education practitioners in an open and distance e-learning (ODeL) university. Our conversations revolved around how we view the Metaverse as a learning space that might afford the most significant competencies in our fields and how we envision the future of education in view of this. We recognize that we are “at the edge” or at the beginning of an era, and the spaces of learning themselves are still in their nascent stages. In spite of this, we acknowledge that many practitioners are also new to the Metaverse, and that it is part of our duty as educators to put forward our views on its use. We put forward our visions on discipline-specific uses of the Metaverse as a learning space. We found an important tension between the possibilities and difficulties in using it and other related technologies in the Philippines and other developing countries. Although our iterative analysis suggests that the Metaverse as a learning platform is a promising space, we also foresee issues relevant to equitable access to quality education. We hope this chapter initiates dialogues on how the adoption of the Metaverse as a learning technology might help narrow increasingly widening digital divides.