[Coinlive Talk] Taking Education to the Next Level: Learning in the Metaverse

• Metaverses have seen increasingly unique and interesting use cases, from marketing to industrial experimentation and application
• For Danielius Stasiulis, Co-Founder and CEO of Learnoverse, the metaverse presents itself as an invaluable opportunity for an enhanced pedagogical experience for those keen on learning more about Web3.0
• A “Learn-to-Earn" token economy ensures that learners, experts, and educators alike are able to earn as they participate in the ecosystem towards a greater understanding of Web3.0

Metaverses have evolved beyond just platforms for entertainment and social interaction – for many projects, the metaverse is a realm for exploring the limits of the way we understand human life. From marketing opportunities to alternate revenue streams, the extent of possibilities in these virtual worlds are endless.

Warner Bros. Pictures for instance, launched a partnership with Roblox in 2021 that saw the celebration of movie In The Heights, while German engineering firm Siemens announced a collaboration between its accelerator program and NVIDIA’s Omniverse to enable drive the use of digital twins to deliver process improvements on an industrial scale.

Recently, blockchain education platform BitDegree has also hopped on to the bandwagon and extended its educational services to the metaverse as well, launching Learnoverse – a crypto learning metaverse. Promising novel concepts such as NFT certificates and crypto tools for its users, the project aims to incentivize learning and seeks to transform the process of learning discovery into an exciting journey that rewards users for learning more about Web 3.0.

To find out more about the adaption of the metaverse within the realm of education, we spoke with Danielius Stasiulis, Co-Founder and CEO of Learnoverse, in an exclusive interview.

“Our basic premise was to realign the incentives between learners, instructors, and companies within an interactive ecosystem,” Danielius tells us. “When the NFT boom started, we realised that there were a lot of Web3.0 users who were interested in having a hands-on experience in learning more about the industry, and so we wanted to provide Web3.0 tools to them and facilitate their learning journey.”

Certainly, metaverse-enabled education may not be an entirely novel concept. Denmark-based virtual reality platform Labster has been widely successful in providing students with immersive learning opportunities in the realms of medicine and chemical experimentation, all from the comfort of their own home. Where these fields once demanded in-person learning and presence in laboratories and operating chambers, students could enjoy greater access and the benefits of remote learning through such platforms while still ensuring they took away with them invaluable learning experiences that would propel them through their selected field of expertise.

Learnoverse, which promises a “learn-to-earn" token economy system that seeks to incentivise learning in a similar manner, envisions a learning experience that actively rewards users for consuming knowledge about the Web3.0 space.

“We wanted to make the process of learning more enjoyable and rewarding for learners,” Daniuelius explains. “With Learnoverse, learners could collect experience points and tokens on our platforms by learning more about the Web3.0 space, and cash them out for monetary rewards.”

For Danielius, the ideal metaverse is one where digital interaction is co-created, co-experienced, and co-owned by everyone. A part of this collaborative process however, stems from the way he views the nascent stages of Web3.0 as of now.

“Right now, a lot of Web3.0 is built upon speculation, as use-cases are still being developed and in progress,” he says. “But that’s okay, because we can build on top of each other’s knowledge through this experimental phase of Web3.0. If something doesn’t work, everyone else should learn from that and continue building with this new knowledge.”

This trial-and-error process is incredibly important for Danielius, given the extent and breadth of the Web3.0 industry.

“We estimate it takes around one hundred learning hours to understand the Web3.0 industry,” he says. “Even if you try to develop a skill without having industry readiness, it’s pointless if you don’t understand how the entire ecosystem works – which makes the barrier of entry really high.”

The Coinlive team with Danielius Stasiulis, Co-Founder and CEO of Learnoverse

Importantly, he believes that learning on such a platform will be much more effective than traditional classroom-based learning. He justifies this through three primary reasons: engineering a social and community-based learning experience; enabling immersive learning; and redefining a fair and equitable education system.

“People from different countries can come here on the platform, interact with one another, and build a community,” he explains. “We want to create a learning experience that can be social and interactive amongst peers in the Web3.0 space”.

Indeed, for those just beginning to delve into learning more about Web3.0, learning often takes place in scattered ways given the nascency of the industry and its complex nature. Often, one would have to rely upon the expertise of skilled veterans and established connections, assets that may not be available to everyone. Yet it is precisely this building of important networking points that arguably forms the basis of Web3.0 itself – a network built on decentralised decision-making and power distribution.

“We wanted to recreate an education system that would be fairer and collaborative for everyone, something that has been the root of a lot of the world’s current education problems,” he explains. “Having people come together from different parts of the world to form a learning academy that is written like a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) would generate not just better access for everyone involved, it would also foster strong communities of learners, educators, and experts.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of having a metaverse-based learning platform however, would be its unparalleled level of immersion, as Danielius explains.

“The metaverse can be incredibly immersive, which can translate into more meaningful engagement levels between learners and educators, which means better pedagogical potential because everyone can have more degrees of freedom to co-create this learning experience,” Danielius tells us. “This means you can create better learning experiences on the overall.”

While the question of whether or not the metaverse can fully supplant or replace our lives of existing education structures, it undoubtedly provides an avenue for alternate means of learning that could very well be best suited to the unpredictable yet comprehensive landscape of Web3.0.

“We’ll see more and more people coming into the industry to learn in due time,” Danielius says as we close off the interview. “Maybe someday, they may become developers, creators, or suppliers to the metaverse and Web3.0 themselves.”

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Readers should take the utmost precaution before making decisions in the crypto market. Coinlive is not responsible or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the article or for any damage or loss to be caused by and in connection to it.