Powered education based on Metaverse: Pre- and post-COVID comprehensive review

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, an increasing interest has been in applying the Metaverse to create unique educational settings. This article reports a review of the literature on Metaverse and its application in higher educational settings to understand its definitive features, evolution from ideation to higher educational use cases, accessibility and affordability, ethical issues, current trends, and future research needs for effective and efficient Metaverse application in higher educational settings. A total of 58 publications between 1992 and 2022 retrieved from Google Scholar and other online portals were reviewed. The review was carried out using Nvivo software for qualitative data analysis to identify and extract the main themes from the reviewed papers, which were then organized thematically, discussed, and presented in the current article. The findings from this review provide an overview of the development of the Metaverse and its application in higher education from a pre-Covid and post-Covid perspective. It highlights the current state of research on applications of the Metaverse in higher education and the development of ten Metaversities funded by Meta, formerly Facebook. Furthermore, the article discusses the main concerns around adopting the Metaverse, which is mainly ethical issues such as data privacy, network security, netiquette, digital citizenship, copyright, and policies.