Rationale

My subject specialisms as a Lecturer in Fashion Marketing at the London College of Fashion include marketing communications and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and the metaverse. I started experimenting with teaching in the metaverse four years ago, while teaching the subject to on-site postgraduate fashion marketing students. I researched education-compatible platforms and discovered Spatial, which is also used for brand activations and recreational games. My first teaching activities in the metaverse included building a gallery-style seminar room, whereby students would enter as their avatars. I sent them to different parts of the metaverse to collect examples of fashion marketing activations, create moodboards of their findings, and upload them to the gallery walls for presentation, much like a three-dimensional Padlet. Feedback to the exercise was overwhelmingly positive, despite a few technical issues in the early days of the technology. 

I recreated this exercise for postgraduate distance-learning fashion marketing students who have no in-person contact and will learn purely via Teams or Blackboard Collaborate. Again, the exercise was a student favourite, and I discussed the possibility of running a virtual social for the students with the course leader.

My rationale for selecting this topic of study is to conduct more formal research into the student experience of the platform, viewed through the PG Cert lens of social justice. The body of academic research into Edu-metaverse has covered a broad range of sectors, including physical education, simulations for collaborative problem-based learning (PBL) in Health/Medical Education, 3-D virtual learning environments for art appreciation and creation in art education, virtual laboratories for STEM Education, and immersive language learning (Chen et al, 2023). However, there is a dearth of research into the student experience for those studying communications. 

I have seen firsthand the potential of the metaverse for future teaching and learning in this highly immersive and engaging environment. Strategically, I believe that it offers great potential for the University of the Arts London, both as part of a hybrid model for on-site students and particularly for those studying via distance learning. Metaverse teaching aligns with UAL’s Five Strategic Pillars, which include a commitment to being responsive to emerging technologies and to creating opportunities to engage with digital tools, data, and AI, so students can use them confidently, ethically, and in ways that amplify their creative ambition (UAL, 2026). 

Furthermore, UAL has committed to bringing education to students from diverse backgrounds, and as discussed in the context, the metaverse is considered by researchers to be a way to level this playing field (Dwivedi et al., 2022). UAL’s strategic pillars explicitly propose ‘Impact and Innovation’ with the commitment to advance innovation in creative education with research, knowledge exchange, innovation and enterprise, focusing on AI and emerging technologies. 

Global technology forecasting firm Gartner predicts metaverse adoption will plateau in the early 2030s (Litan, 2022). This gives higher education institutions such as UAL less than five years to evaluate and potentially implement the technology. This study aims to contribute to conversations within the university on how to potentially implement the technology.