EXPERIENCES ON THE CREATION OF A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY COURSE IN A METAVERSE ENVIRONMENT

COVID-19 and climate change have both influenced the way we will organize higher education in the future. Turku University of Applied Sciences has developed its own metaverse technology to be used in higher education and industrial competence training. In this paper, we will report how this technology has been adapted to the requirements of higher education in medical sciences and health technology as part of the international Erasmus+ funded Artificial intelligence, innovation & society (AIIS) project which identifies a requirement for immersive multi-user learning.  The AIIS project's main objective is to provide a course for medical students and health technology engineering students, where AI, innovation, and soft skills will play a key role, promoting the integration of the course into European universities’ curricula. Combining metaverse technology with students from medical and engineering disciplines will allow us to simulate real-life problem-solving very closely while offering participants the unique possibility to deepen their professional understanding and multidisciplinary knowledge. The project´s goals support CDIO’s idea on providing integrated learning experiences (standard 7) and active learning (standard 8). This paper outlines our pedagogy considerations based on a sound theoretical framework and how we translated these considerations to suit the constraints and opportunities afforded by a metaverse environment that should be appropriate for both desktop and virtual reality headset users. Moreover, we examine content formatting, course pacing, assessment, and knowledge origin as the key elements of a typical learning landscape and how to adapt these for a metaverse setting. Additionally, to confirm the design choices for content and task presentation in a metaverse, this paper briefly gives the headline results of a large-scale pilot that was run at the time of this writing. Our paper contributes a comprehensive first draft pedagogy model for a metaverse collaborative learning environment, providing a practical contribution for educators venturing into metaverse-based teaching and a theoretical springboard for researchers to further enhance the body of knowledge concerning contemporary education technologies.