Meta wants to launch a new education product for Quest devices later this year.
Takeaway Points
- Meta wants to launch a new education product for Quest devices later this year.
- The aim is to help teachers, trainers, and administrators to bring subjects to life in new ways by giving them access to different education-specific apps and features.
- The new product is the result of extensive consultation and collaboration with educators, researchers, and third-party developers working in the education space around the world.
- In 2022, Morehouse College reported that students who learned in VR had an average final test score of 85, versus 78 in person.
The parent company of Whatsapp, Meta, said on Monday that it’s going to launch a new education product for Quest devices later this year. The aim is to help teachers, trainers, and administrators to bring subjects to life in new ways by giving them access to different education-specific apps and features.
Meta said that the new product is the result of extensive consultation and collaboration with educators, researchers, and third-party developers working in the education space around the world. Meta explained some of the things that can be done with the quest devices, like taking students on field trips to the best museums no matter the distance; virtual laboratories can be built and equipped by schools that cannot afford to do that physically.
In the coming months, the product’s name and features will be announced and at launch, Meta plans to make the product available in their Quest for Business supported markets to institutions serving learners aged 13+.
According to the report, some colleges and institutions are including them in their curriculums. New Mexico State University is teaching criminal justice by immersing students in virtual crime scenes to learn how to best investigate. Stanford University is using virtual reality to teach its Business School students soft skills, like how to have a difficult conversation or how to nail an interview. The University of Glasgow is teaching life sciences by placing students inside virtual intestines to see how the body battles bacteria.
Meta said that research shows that students perform well learning with virtual reality. In 2022, Morehouse College reported that students who learned in VR had an average final test score of 85, versus 78 in person. A survey by the XR Association found that 77% of educators believe these technologies ignite curiosity and improve engagement in class.
New Features on Meta
On April 11, Meta introduced new features on Instagram and other Meta apps to help protect young people from sextortion and intimate image abuse and to make it more difficult for potential scammers and criminals to find and interact with teens.
According to the report, the updates were built on long-standing work to help protect young people from unwanted or potentially harmful contact. Teens message settings were stricter, so they can’t be messaged by anyone they weren’t already connected to; they showed safety notices to teens who were already in contact with potential scam accounts, and they offered a dedicated option for people to report DMs that were threatening to share private images. Meta also supported the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in developing Take It Down, a platform that lets young people take back control of their intimate images and helps prevent them being shared online – taking power away from scammers.
