Conceptualizing an Inclusive Metaverse for Enhanced Learning Among Students with Disabilities

Traditional learning environments often fail to meet the diverse needs of students with disabilities due to various barriers, such as limited physical accessibility and a lack of personalized learning approaches. The emerging metaverse holds the potential to revolutionize education with its immersive and interactive capabilities, overcoming these traditional limitations. Despite research on metaverse-based inclusive learning, there is still a significant need for solutions that offer customized learning for various disabilities, comprehensive virtual support from educators and therapists, and enhanced analysis of student progress through cloud computing. Addressing this issue, our paper introduces a motivational scenario for an inclusive metaverse learning platform from which we derive the requirements for this platform. The paper identifies gaps in the existing literature, proposes an early metaverse architecture, and discusses potential research challenges. Utilizing a combination of advanced technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Federated Learning (FL), cloud computing, and blockchain, the proposed architecture aims to provide personalized educational experiences while ensuring robust data analysis, privacy, and security. Through this architecture, the study demonstrates how metaverse technologies can transform educational practices, making them more accessible and effective for students with disabilities.