The Metaverse in University Education during COVID-19: A Systematic Review of Success Factors

The experiences that the COVID-19 pandemic brought led educational institutions to use disruptive technologies that guaranteed continuity of learning in the face of any adverse scenario, ranging from the conceptual to the experiential. This article aims to describe how the metaverse contributed to university education, and through these factors the success of its application was evidenced. For which a systematic review of the literature was developed. The research is exploratory-descriptive level. A total of 738 documents from the Scopus, ERIC, Taylor & Francis, and Google Scholar databases were reviewed, from which 16 articles were finally extracted. The content analysis technique was used through the Atlas Ti software. With this, it was obtained as a result that the type of metaverse used to a greater extent was virtual reality. Likewise, the areas of study in which they were applied to a greater extent are in education: medicine, engineering and administration. In addition, the factors that evidenced the improvement in university education as an effect of the application of the metaverse are academic performance and interaction between students. It is concluded that, given the pandemic scenario and the need to continue the teaching-learning process considering the limitations offered by the virtual modality in which experiential learning is not developed, it led to the development of learning scenarios through the metaverse. However, it will be necessary to reduce the gaps in terms of teaching skills, create teaching scenarios in the virtual world, use and evaluate them permanently.