Figure 1 Poster session of APSCE 1st International Conference on Future Language Learning 2022 in Gather. Town
The rise of the metaverse and its application in education has brought about educational transformations in terms of providing an immersive and interactive learning experience for students, enabling collaboration and communication among students and teachers in real-time, and making impossible learning activities (such as experiencing ancient culture) possible. However, the metaverse also has its limitations and challenges such as issues related to a high cost of development, accessibility, ethical issues and the digital divide. In addition, instructional design has rarely been taken into account in the metaverse platform development and applications. In the light of these concerns, our research team in the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology is developing a metaverse platform – ‘Learningverse’ which provides rich social interactions and collaborative activities in an immersive experience learning environment (refer to Figure 2).
Figure 2 Screenshot of a group activity for ‘Assembling the Solar System’ in Learningverse.
Figure 3 An example of using ChatGPT to write a Python programme
Another platform - ChatGPT has aroused attention of the public in the past few months. ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot developed by OpenAI that understands complex topics suchas physics, maths and coding. In education, ChatGPT could be used as a language translation tool, an automated essay grading tool, and a virtual tutor as it has learned the patterns and structures of human language, and can generate text that is grammatically correct and semantically meaningful (See Figure 3 for an example).
Some students have attempted to use ChatGPT for doing assignments and even exams, which is quite a wake-up call for educators. Therefore, some universities have explicitly banned the use of ChatGPT. To cope with the issue, a few organisations and individuals have been putting efforts in working out ChatGPT ‘killers’. Up till now, the detector – GPTZero developed by Edward Tian, a senior student at Princeton University, has received the most attention. Some people challenge the validity of these text detectors. As a result, the tug-of-war between these detectors and ChatGPT is sparking heated debate.
In summary, the metaverse and ChatGPT have the potential to be valuable tools for education, but it is important to consider their limitations and challenges before applying them. As the field continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications of metaverse and ChatGPT in education.
