THE METAVERSE AS AN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: FROM VIRTUAL WORLDS TO PERSONALIZED AI TUTORS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37472/2617-3107-2025-8-17Keywords:
AI tutor, artificial intelligence, higher education, MetaverseAbstract
Rapid advances in digital technology are transforming higher education. The Metaverse, combining virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality technologies, blockchain, digital twins, and non-fungible tokens, offers an exciting, personalised, and interactive learning experience, making it a powerful tool in modern higher education. In this paper, the authors set out to analyse scientific sources that highlight the use of the Metaverse in combination with AI technologies to improve higher education. To achieve this goal, scientific papers were selected from three international scientometric databases (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC), a search strategy was developed based on key search queries and inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a bibliometric analysis and narrative review of the selected scientific papers was conducted. Using bibliometric analysis in VOSviewer, network visualisation was performed to analyse and display the co-occurrence of keywords in the selected scientific publications. A narrative review of the papers selected according to the established criteria was used to identify ways to combine the Metaverse with AI technologies to enhance higher education; the main directions include the creation of user-friendly and useful environments and their expansion to virtual university campu-ses, the implementation of AI capabilities for security in the Metaverse, creating personalised user experiences based on their behaviour and preferences, facilitating real-time communication, generating content for the Metaverse, combining the physical and digital worlds, and implementing AI tutoring.
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