Abstract:

The Metaversity project, developed within the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, is conceived as an initiative aimed at exploring the use of the Metaverse in the university context, particularly in teaching activities.

This contribution derives from a phase of the project that considers how the introduction of new technologies (such as immersive virtual reality environments) reshapes the communicative interactions of the participants (i.e., students and instructors) involved. By communicative interactions we refer to all actions carried out by individuals (or subjects) with other individuals, artifacts, and environments.

Specifically, in this phase, in order to understand students’ perspectives on the metaverse applied to university teaching, four experimental sessions were conducted (N = 18; two groups n = 4, and two groups n = 5) with students enrolled in degree programs at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. In each session, a group of students from the same degree program engaged in an immersive activity designed to develop a teaching unit within the metaversal environment created through EngageVR, and subsequently discussed the activity itself, particularly with regard to the uses and purposes of the metaverse in teaching.

Data were collected via video recordings from two angles of the communicative interactions that took place. To capture these interactions in their complexity, a methodological pathway was defined, drawing on multimodal (inter)action analysis, analysis of conversations, and argumentation analysis (for further details, see Discourses From The Metaverse: A Methodological Approach to Immersive Interaction in Higher Education, presented at ICERI 2025).

This contribution focuses on one of the five typologies that emerged concerning the uses and purposes of the metaverse in teaching: its practical-experiential nature. The analysis is conducted on three moments identified within the experimental sessions that substantiate this function of the metaverse in education. In particular, analysis of conversations is applied to elaborate a psychosocial hypothesis on how the metaverse in teaching can be interpreted as having a practical-experiential nature.

The data analysis is still ongoing. Consequently, the results will be detailed in the presentation of this contribution. The findings and conclusions may highlight how the metaverse can be used to foster practical experiences and promote learning by doing in the university context.

Keywords:

Metaverse, Higher Education, Immersive Learning, Analysis of Conversations.