College to become a ‘metaversity’ this fall

Lorain County Community College is stepping into the future as it becomes an official “metaversity” this fall.

Hailing from the partnership of Greg Little, associate professor and an augmented reality and virtual reality (VR/AR) specialist at LCCC, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, the “metaversity” concept is one that brings the ideas of VR and AR as a common tool in the school.

“I was contacted by Meta Immersive Learning and Victory XR learning back in January,” Little said. “They told me about how they were working on making classrooms virtual ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, and offered to gift us 40 Oculus Quests and help build a campus twin.”

The campus twin is a model already seen in 25 other schools across the country, he said.

These “metaversities” leverage the power of virtual reality to create a new, immersive learning experience for students, Little said.

This includes creating a digital replica of their campus or classrooms so that a student can use VR to transform learning when he or she is on campus or remote learning, he said.

“The idea is that these headsets would be loaned to students and they could attend class from anywhere,” Little said.

Daniel Vasi, who teaches at LCCC, already has taken up the challenge with the new digital classrooms.

“What his students will be doing, is they will have the opportunity to borrow the headsets and go home and play games,” Little said. “The headsets will keep track of data points from the games that the students will have, then analyze in their statistics class the next day.”

The technology will go live in May for Vasi’s class and as interest grows, is scheduled to be in full service for the fall semester.

The project is not going full campus-wide, Little said, but rather will be implemented in classrooms.

“Think of it as an experiment,” he said. “Our hope is to find out if this is successful.

“And we don’t want to let others out of the loop on new technology.”

“What his students will be doing, is they will have the opportunity to borrow the headsets and go home and play games. The headsets will keep track of data points from the games that the students will have, then analyze in their statistics class the next day.”

— Greg Little, associate professor, augmented reality and virtual reality (VR/AR) at LCCC