The Role of the Metaverse in Medical Education
Two decades ago, Friedman (1999) described the concept of the ‘‘marvelous medical education machine’’ or how medical education can gradually be “unstuck” in space, time, and content through appropriate use of technology. With the advent of the metaverse, marvelous medical education machine is now becoming a reality. Metaverse is a combination of “meta” and “universe” which describes a parallel or virtual environment linked to the physical world. The term metaverse was first used in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his science-fiction novel Snow Crash (Tlili et al., 2022). In educational concepts, Metaverse is an umbrella term used to describe all kinds of immersive technologies, including virtual (VR), augmented (AR) or mixed realities (MR), applied to advance teaching and learning practices. A user would typically wear a head-mounted display that blends the physical and digital world that can be explored and interacted with by people using e.g., avatars or virtual representations of themselves.
Application of Metaverse or Meta platforms in medical education offers new technological and pedagogical affordances for the development of healthcare professionals’ competencies ranging from patient care, medical knowledge, procedural training to interprofessional teamwork, diagnostic reasoning, and critical thinking. Here are some examples of how immersive technologies are being used to transform transforming medical education and healthcare. MR technology was used to augment bedside rounds experience as viewed by trainees through an expert’s eyes using a headset device (Salavitabar et al., 2022). This new format enabled teams of learners to interact with patients, peers, and mentors, while simultaneously visualizing the patient’s clinical findings, imaging, and laboratory studies at the bedside. In another study, the research team has developed the multi-user Virtual Reality for Cardiac Arrest Resuscitation application. This application allows four trainees to be in the same ‘virtual room’ and work together to care for a virtual cardiac arrest patient - all under realistic time pressure and rapid workload changes. A systematic understanding of how metaverse applications can leverage their unique affordances to best support procedural training, clinical decision-making skills and teamwork mechanisms, among many others, which is still lacking in medical education. In brief, while the evolving structure of immersive technologies has real potential in all aspects of health education at all levels, we need to understand how the unique features of metaverse-based teaching and learning can be best employed into learning design and the overall future of healthcare education.
The goal of this Article Collection is to solicit the contribution and submission of manuscripts examining topics about metaverse applications in medical education.