ALP Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung und Personalführung – lernraum.zukunftVR
“The metaverse is dead.” Really?
You hear it often: VR in education was a hype that has passed, nobody cares about the metaverse any more. Anyone who thinks that way is missing the decisive difference between a gimmick and genuine pedagogical innovation.
The ALP – Bavaria’s academy for teacher training and school leadership – makes the case with its course “Storytelling für Lehrkräfte”. Its lernraum.zukunftVR runs on RAUM, and it is not used as a marketing promise but as a working tool for the professional development of teachers – grounded in the Theory of Immersive Collaborative Learning (TICOL) by Guido Makransky and G. B. Petersen, and scientifically accompanied by Josef Buchner (PH St. Gallen).
Why VR, and not another video call? Real collaboration at a distance usually suffers from the distance itself. The course design uses the four pillars of TICOL to break through exactly that:
Social presence – participants experience their colleagues in the virtual room as real counterparts. The sense of connection goes far beyond the monotonous grid of a video conference.
Physical presence – the feeling of being “there” together creates a learning space that dissolves geographical boundaries and opens up a different learning atmosphere.
Agency – working on storytelling together in VR, moving blocks around, visualising hero journeys, turns a passive viewer into an active author of their own knowledge.
Body ownership – embodiment through an avatar makes social interaction more natural and more intuitive.
The scientific framing keeps the immersion from becoming an end in itself: it is aimed squarely at cognitive activation and practical competence. The pilot evaluation bears that out – technological competence rises, and participants have so far rated the quality of the collaboration as “outstanding”.
The ALP’s own conclusion is the one worth keeping: the word “metaverse” may have lost its shine, but as a learning space it is only just getting started. Anyone who reduces VR to an avatar has probably not yet grasped what embodied presence can do.
The full write-up is on LinkedIn.
