Teaching in the Metaverse at the University of Ghana

There is a rapid increase in electronic learning (e-learning) due to recent worldwide happenings such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Many universities around the world had to resort to e-learning for many of their courses. Many universities use e-learning platforms, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. These platforms, however, lack interactivity and retention.A more immersive virtual platform is the Metaverse, which is a virtual world that mimics the real world in many ways. This paper presents the design, development and deployment of a prototype for an immersive e-learning platform in the Metaverse. Four approaches were used to implement the proposed e-learning system. implementation from scratch (first principles), implementation using XR Interaction Toolkit (XRITK) and Photon Unity Networking 2 (PUN 2), using Meta Virtual Reality Toolkit (OVRTK) with PUN 2, and using XRITK (Extended Reality Interaction Toolkit) and Normcore. We were able to conclude the last approach - implementation using XRITK and Normcore, was the most feasible and yielded the most stable and presentable application. Although we only had the Meta headset and controllers, we were able to build a Metaverse of the University of Ghana with all the features present in any Metaverse applications.