Executive Summary

Most high school students are unengaged and uninspired in school, and spend year after year in classrooms that stymie their youthful energy and natural curiosity.  For their part, teachers must expect to live paycheck to paycheck with no opportunities for financial upside; even some of the most committed burn out or leave the profession altogether.  And schools themselves are complex, highly political institutions, running at very high overhead costs under crippling inefficiencies and no incentive for innovation and self-regeneration.  That we’ve reached the point when, even in the earliest days of AI, a student can learn more from a free conversation with ChatGPT than from an entire schoolday sitting in the classroom makes this one of the most important social issues of our time.

The Deeper Learning Metaverse is a platform that enables users to create curricular Deeper Learning Courseware and to launch it within an immersive, digital environment designed to scaffold and assess attainment in real time.  Attainment is then measured vs standards-based criteria, and packaged as multidimensional credentials officially recognized by traditional educational institutions.  A wide array of monetary and reputational incentives ensures the cohesion of the Metaverse’s stakeholder ecosystem, the vitality of its courseware authoring efforts, and the monetization of its credentials as tuition grants designated for Learners’ next stage of academic development.

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At the same time, the Deeper Learning Metaverse is an MMORPG, with its own narrative, goals, and game mechanics. Learners experience it as educator-designated forays into an expansive, Fortnite-like world in which online players learn from their surroundings in order to develop the skills needed to collaborate with teammates and accomplish a particular Mission. The main difference is not only the more structured nature of gameplay, but that these skills can only be obtained by grasping standards-based Core Subjects.  This transforms traditional academic instruction and evaluation into an unprecedentedly engaging experience that surrounds the senses by a 3D environment that is self-contained and responsive in real-time.  It’s the formula for a particularly powerful form of experiential learning that ushers in a new era of personalized, self-motivated pedagogy, one that augments and re-energizes the legacy lecture/cram/forget model currently pervasive in brick and mortar schooling.

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This long-overdue redesign of the teaching-learning process is now possible thanks to recent discoveries into human cognition and behavior, cheaper and more sophisticated tools for 3D content production, and the advent of LLMs.  New thinking in old topics has also contributed, such as wider assessment criteria for standards-based curricular programs, greater institutional acceptance of new types of transcripts and credentials, and the academia-industry consensus regarding the centrality of skills and competencies for XXI century employment.  Last, but not least, is money.  Huge inefficiencies in current educational practice have reached a boiling point, as they leave students with sticker shock at every level, even as teachers struggle with meager salaries, rising cost-of-living, and annual increases that barely keep up with inflation.  Our main axiom of design is a radical re-prioritization of these stakeholders, so that the former attain a better education at a much lower cost, and the latter a broad array of new, scalable sources of income.