The Metaverse: Providing Knowledge Transfer in Educational Organizations: A Practical Approach

Human environments are the spaces where activities and relationships are carried out. These environments refer not only to physical places, but also to virtual spaces where activities such as knowledge transfer and learning processes happen. (Del Giudice, Scuotto and Papa, 2023). Considering that, since the end of the last century the Knowledge Age started, various evidence has shown that traditional organisations are having a competitiveness crisis in a V.U.C.A. world (Jin, 1999). This paper evaluates whether providing knowledge in a digital environment using the Metaverse technology is effective improving skills and confidence of the users. The research question of the paper explores the impact of the Metaverse on students’ knowledge and confidence changes, together with student’s experiences and perspectives, by conducting a practical experiment on 45 students from the Bachelor course of “Economics and business models management'' in the ICT & Media faculty at Università degli Studi di Torino. A negotiation business case was developed in Spatial thanks to the collaboration with Synesthesia, an Italian digital experience company with expertise in digital application development. Meta Quest 2 viewers were used for the experimentation. This experiment aims to understand whether the Metaverse leads to better learning results in knowledge transfer. To this goal, the experimental setting used two different scenarios, where one was negotiating in the Metaverse and the other in an in-person simulation. Students filled in a questionnaire to measure their level of knowledge on aspects related to the theory and practice of negotiation before the course and after the case; the questionnaire also collected some socio-demographic information, such as gender and educational background. The findings of this study are encouraging and could contribute to understanding the transformative power of the Metaverse as a tool for enhancing equal knowledge transfer in educational institutions. Students who engaged in practical cases within the Metaverse demonstrated a higher proficiency in applying theoretical knowledge to real-world scenarios, demonstrating higher confidence. Notably, female students who engaged in the Metaverse experienced a higher increase in confidence compared to female students who ran the negotiation in person. This highlights the potential of the Metaverse in fostering an equal knowledge transfer process, bridging the gap between theory and practice.