A comprehensive metaverse might be a long way off, but the industry’s biggest player is trying to plant its flag in the American education industry right now. This week I got a peek into one of Meta’s signature virtual-reality projects: a round of partnerships with college educators who have been using Meta’s technologies in their classrooms. I joined them for a virtual roundtable using the Meta Quest 3 headset, and then spoke to Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg about how it’s all shaking out. “The absorption of information by students and the way the students embraced this platform was unbelievable,” said Sherman Tippin, an attorney and adjunct professor teaching “Law in the Metaverse” at William & Mary College of Law. He was among professors from 11 colleges including his own, Carnegie Mellon University, and Utah Valley College, the three of which just joined the program — and they nearly all shared his enthusiasm. Clegg told me this excitement came organically. “We haven't been going around dumping Quest headsets on reluctant educators, this has been us responding increasingly to people who are at the forefront of using technology in education, and if anything I think we’ve been somewhat behind,” Clegg said. He wrote in April that virtual reality is uniquely suited for educational purposes — allowing for both a kind of immersive social interaction that improves the learning experience, as well as access to simulations or experiences not otherwise available at a brick-and-mortar campus. He said that VR headsets offered a specialized learning tool for schools in keeping with pedagogical best practices. “The educational systems that always seem to do best are those that have worked out how to tailor educational experiences around the individual needs of the student,” Clegg said, asserting that virtual reality devices allow for uniquely beneficial personal tailoring. Of course, uptake for such a new technology at a large scale has revealed some institutional speed bumps as well, like time-consuming login processes that could hold up large classes of students. Clegg said that while the tech can be “relatively cumbersome to use” at the moment, he’s eager to pass along findings from the classroom experience to Meta’s engineering team. While the metaverse classroom experience might be futuristic, there’s a present-day policy concern that could potentially interfere with Clegg’s vision for an educational metaverse: Aggressive American antitrust enforcement, as Meta and the Federal Trade Commission remain locked in an ongoing legal dogfight. I asked Clegg whether he worried at all that Meta could be painting yet another regulatory bullseye on its chest with its expansion into education tech, installing itself as a sort of default operating system for the virtual classroom. He was skeptical of the idea, noting that some of the participants in yesterday’s meeting were using other companies’ technology to interact with its educational materials. “It doesn't feel to us at all that we’re somehow sweeping into virgin territory where no one else is competing,” Clegg said. He nodded to the fact that their educational apps are available through their own Meta Quest Store, but said Meta didn’t have “an entirely unopposed monopoly” in education.
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