LiveTeach: Bringing Real-Time Virtual Education to Decentraland
By Decentraland DAO, , in Community Highlights
LiveTeach, is the DAO-funded project building an open-source educational platform in Decentraland. Set to broaden the possibilities of online education, the project provides a platform for live, virtual 3D classes where teachers can manipulate a variety of educational content in real time as well as offering scene templates, a community venue, administration dApp, and more.
LiveTeach is just one of the latest examples of how an engaged community, DAO-led grant program, and Decentraland’s open protocol each play a fundamental part in broadening the horizons of virtual worlds and the opportunities offered by the metaverse. In addition to delivering a ready-to-use educational platform and venue, the work done by LiveTeach will help contribute to the continued evolution of virtual teaching. Being a totally open source project, educators and creators everywhere can implement the tools and resources developed by LiveTeach into their own scenes or even add onto them, developing additional educational features.
Improving remote education with 3D environments
The years following Covid brought to light the immense potential of virtual education—classes you could attend from the comfort of home not only made them accessible regardless of your global location, but also removed barriers for groups that have difficulties attending classes IRL, be it due to social sensitivities or medical reasons. However, the transition to mainly virtual meetings and classes also revealed the medium’s limitations.
While tech giants have teased the idea of learning in the metaverse for years, a live, 3D platform, such as LiveTeach has yet to appear in the Web3 landscape. To take teaching virtual, educators have been limited to traditional video conferencing options such as Zoom and Google Meets which struggle to offer a way to keep students engaged and tend to take a greater toll on energy and motivation levels. Being confined to two dimensions also limits the teaching methods that teachers can employ and perhaps even the effectiveness of their instruction overall.
Just by being hosted in Decentraland’s 3D virtual world, virtual classes become infinitely more engaging. Students feel a greater sense of presence and community when they’re able to virtually sit side-by-side with their peers and even have the opportunity to make friends. As opposed to the wall of account icons you’re met with in a class on Zoom, you’ll be able to meet your classmates as if they’re really there, their personalities shining through their unique digital identities.
In addition to helping students feel more invested in their virtual classes, a 3D educational environment is able to provide certain critical teaching elements that are lacking from traditional online classes. The LiveTeach platform will provide the capability for teachers to include 3D elements in their lessons—and not only static models, but both animated and interactive 3D elements as well! Imagine a virtual chemistry class where students could observe and interact with a supersized 3D molecule, even rearranging it to create different formulas, or art history students being able to take a stroll through a virtual recreation of the Hagia Sophia without leaving their homes? Thanks to the framework being built by the LiveTeach project, the possibilities for virtual education in Decentraland are endless!
Education blooms in Decentraland’s University district
LiveTeach was founded by veteran e-learning professional, James Ashton, the very same who co-founded Decentraland’s University district, which launched in 2017. Set to revolutionize education in Decentraland, Ashton’s proposal for LiveTeach outlined the full set of features and resources that would be developed to bring the platform into being. Passed by the community with a 94% approval rate in August 2023, the project was granted 140,000 USD and set to work with plans to release LiveTeach to the public in early 2024.
LiveTeach headquarters will be located in the University district’s learning zone and will consist of a Community Venue filled with classrooms that teachers can apply to the DAO to reserve for classes. But LiveTeach as a project will be providing much more than a learning environment. The full scope of the grant’s deliverables will consist of a ready-to-use, comprehensive live-teaching platform, documentation, and all the technical resources necessary to replicate the platform in other scenes or develop new functionalities on top of the pre-existing ones:
LiveTeach: A 3D, live virtual education platform
A platform of virtual classrooms where multiple classes can be held concurrently
Administrative dApp that can be used by LAND operators to manage teaching rights, and by teachers to manage enrollment and teaching materials
Teaching console that allows instructors to manipulate teaching materials in real time, switching between content, pausing or jumping through videos, and more
Support for a variety of teaching materials such as images, videos, animated and interactive 3D models, polls, and quizzes
Student-teacher notifications (raising hand)
Seating manager
Community Venue
A community teaching venue located in Decentraland University with management features for the DAO to oversee teaching rights.
Three Classroom Scene Templates
Classroom which requires no server
Classroom which works with the LiveTeach reference server
Classroom designed to be used in Worlds
Development Tools
A NPM package for developers to use LiveTeach in their scenes and add on new functionalities
Reference server and SDK server abstraction
dApp and accompanying smart contract that manages teachers and enrollment
Documentation
The LiveTeach team set out to cover all the needs of teachers with different levels of experience and have built the platform with the aim of making it as technically simple to use as possible. The community is eager to start using it in early 2024, so there will surely be plenty of enthusiastic volunteers to test out the platform’s capabilities. If the Community Venue is a success, the LiveTeach team is already looking forward to developing additional features to take the platform’s capabilities even farther.
The next steps for LiveTeach
The Decentraland University LiveTeach project is set to launch in early 2024. Recently, the technical team shared its third report on their progress. At this point, the NPM Package is nearing completion and includes an integrated API documentation framework. The second classroom template (with an integrated reference server) has become functional, validating the server abstraction design, while the first classroom template has almost completed the QA process. The project’s main smart contract, enhanced by the newly implemented teachers contract, now facilitates on-chain classroom content publishing while the project’s dApp now supports content management. Most importantly, 3D modeling of the LiveTeach Community Venue has been completed and has been deployed in Decentraland University for peer testing.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/oGUoIC9x_Hs
Looking towards the end of the development period, the team will be focusing on QA ahead of the project’s release next year as well as finishing documentation. They’ll work on improving the UI and finalizing all classroom templates as well as a few remaining deliverables. Development will come to a close with public tests of the Community Venue and community engagement to get LiveTeach fully operational.
To take part in the process, you can follow their progress and check their public folder with screenshots and videos. You can also suggest how they should handle their Documentation website. Moreover, you can refer to their public repositories, including the LiveTeach Web3 repo, the LiveTeach Examples repo, the LiveTeach Package repo, the LiveTeach Server repo, and finally, the LiveTeach Community Venue repo. If it’s the project’s educational potential you’re here for, it’s never too early to start thinking about what types of courses you’d like to teach via LiveTeach once it’s live, so get brainstorming!
The metaverse is full of yet unrecognized potential and opportunities. Do you have an idea that could benefit the Decentraland community? Learn more about the DAO’s grants here.
Do you know of a cool Decentraland community project that you think should be next in the Community Highlights series? Contact the Decentraland Foundation team @decentraland on X.
Disclaimer: The service described in this article was not developed or audited by the Decentraland Foundation. Always be careful when engaging in any kind of transaction. Decentraland is not responsible for any loss of funds/assets.