A Study on the Development of Metaverse-Based Culture and Arts Education Utilizing Digital Storytelling

In the digital era, convergent cultural arts education must not only emphasize an understanding of advanced technologies but also provide programs that encourage the expansion of thinking and expression. As remote education became more prevalent due to COVID-19, technology-based cultural arts education has rapidly expanded. However, indiscriminate use of digital media has often resulted in only temporary engagement from learners, making it difficult to establish a structured and sustainable educational framework. This study proposes a digital storytelling-based convergent cultural arts education programaimed at enhancing video content production capabilities using the metaverse. While the metaverse offers significant advantages as an educational medium—such as expanded time-space interactions, avatar utilization, spatial simultaneity, realism, and interactivity—its use in experience-based cultural arts educationoften focuses excessively on technological learning. This can limit its effectiveness in achieving meaningful educational goals. To address this, the study presents <Creating Stories in the Metaverse>, a metaverse-based cultural arts education program that leverages digital storytelling to enhance learning motivation, creative problem-solving, and communicative collaboration. This program is designed to help arts educators understand the characteristics of the metaverse as a medium, develop the ability to utilize digital technologies, and function as creators while designing practical curricula. In the future, <Creating Stories in the Metaverse>will serve as a case study demonstrating how metaverse-based education can enhance arts educators’ digital competency, strengthen storytelling-based digital literacy, and expand learner-centered convergent cultural arts education. Based on this approach, future research should focus on developing sustainable metaverse-based cultural arts education models that integrate with formal school curricula while also exploring personalized interactive storytelling techniques for broader implementation in digital arts pedagogy and learner-centered educational frameworks.