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Meeting current and future global challenges requires people with the necessary knowledge to resolve them. Training students with the skills and competencies needed to understand and respond adequately to global challenges is intensified in university settings. For this reason, Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and the Universidad del Norte (Uninorte) in Colombia developed an international learning experience in the metaverse. This experience found that the use of the metaverse promotes the development of highly valued transversal competencies in contemporary professional fields, such as autonomy, personal initiative, communicative competence, and self-regulated learning. In this article, we share our experience.
Achieving international university collaboration is challenging due to factors such as distance, scheduling, logistics, budgets, academic considerations, and differing expectations between institutions, among others. However, the metaverse offers a solution to these problems. It is a virtual environment that recreates physical or other digital world spaces, allowing people to work, meet, play, and socialize within it. The metaverse is supported by Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies (Mujica-Sequera, 2022). Through the Tec Virtual Campus metaverse of Tecnológico de Monterrey, we established an international collaboration between the two universities during the semester from February to June 2025.
International university collaboration in the Tec Virtual Campus metaverse
The Universidad del Norte (Uninorte) in Colombia offers courses that promote global learning experiences. This initiative supports innovative teaching, intercultural dialogue, and the development of essential competencies in a globalized academic environment. For its part, Tecnológico de Monterrey offers a classroom-based internationalization program to foster international collaboration among its teachers and students, in response to the need to develop socio-emotional skills in a global context.
When collaboration is not physically possible, immersive virtual spaces, such as the Tec Virtual Campus Metaverse, emerge as a disruptive tool in higher education. The metaverse enables three-dimensional virtual classrooms, real-world simulations, and real-time global collaboration. It potentially makes possible a more flexible, ubiquitous, and participatory educational model, opening the way to new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment in interdisciplinary and intercultural settings (De La O Miranda & Cortés Campos, 2023).
The metaverse facilitates international university collaboration
In our collaboration, the primary objective was to create a multicultural learning experience through the Tec Virtual Campus metaverse, enabling students from both countries to develop key competencies for a globalized world. At the end of the course, we assessed students’ perception of the impact of the metaverse on various dimensions of learning. The results showed a favorable perception of developed competencies, including autonomy and personal initiative, the ability to process information, digital competency, communicative competency, and self-regulated learning.
Additionally, the students perceived the use of multimedia communication tools and collaborative interaction within the immersive environment as positive, highlighting the metaverse’s potential to foster interpersonal, digital, and global citizenship skills. In general, the learning experience and results are relevant to academic programs that aim to train leaders with intercultural competencies, critical thinking, and the ability to operate in dynamic, complex work environments.
Joint subject taught in the two universities in Mexico and Colombia
Jointly designing a subject between two universities in different countries is a challenging endeavour. Alignment of teaching methodologies, teaching resources, schedules, and expectations across institutions should be considered to ensure students have a meaningful and memorable learning experience.
To carry out this multicultural learning experience in the metaverse, we relied on two primary methodologies. The first facilitated international interactions among virtual classrooms, a model called COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning). This methodology utilizes active learning and student collaboration in different countries. Teachers plan and implement synchronous and asynchronous activities to foster integration and collaborative work in multicultural teams (CEDU-Uninorte, 2025). The second methodology is the World Café, which encourages collaboration among students working in large teams, facilitating small-table dialogue that promotes participation for all, stimulates active listening, and allows ideas to circulate spontaneously. It is a widely recommended methodology for generating in-depth conversations in a short amount of time. It promotes co-creation and the development of richer, more consensual conclusions than those achieved through traditional learning dynamics.
Four main COIL activities were carried out during this learning experience in the Tec Virtual Campus metaverse: In an icebreaker activity, each student created a 1.5-minute personal video presentation using Padlet and Teams platforms. In their videos, the students included their personal presentation and a cultural fact of their country. During the collaboration (which took place in two synchronous sessions), World Café dynamics resulted in the development of infographics that were exhibited at the Metaverse Gallery. In the fourth moment of the COIL methodology, the students shared a reflection on the wall of acquired knowledge and learning on the Padlet collaboration platform. In an asynchronous activity, students created posts that integrated aspects of organizational culture, SDG 8, and their multicultural experiences.
Students from Mexico and Colombia interacted in the metaverse
Forty-nine students participated in this experience (21 from Tec de Monterrey and 28 from the Universidad del Norte). The subjects in this educational innovation project were Strategy and Talent Block and Talent Management Module (Tec de Monterrey) and Organizational Development (Universidad del Norte).
During the implementation, the students, organized into 10 dialogue tables across various locations of the Tec Virtual Campus Metaverse, experienced the dynamics of the World Cafe. They answered five questions in multicultural teams regarding the contents of “Competitive Values Model to Analyze an Organizational Culture” (Competing Values Framework, Cameron & Quinn, 2011a) and “Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent work and Economic Growth” (Moran, 2024).
The students debated the following questions:
- Tables 1 and 6: What kind of practices can the organization implement to stimulate decent work? Reflect on SDG 8.
- Tables 2 and 7: In what organizational situations would clan culture be successfully applicable? Explain the clan’s culture and give an example.
- Tables 3 and 8: How can the culture of adhocracy help achieve Objective 8.3 of SDG 8? Explain the culture of adhocracy and give an example.
- Tables 4 and 9: Describe an advantage and a disadvantage of implementing a hierarchical culture. Explain hierarchical culture and give examples.
- Tables 5 and 10: What consequences would an organization face for lacking features of a market culture? Explain market culture and give an example.
Tec Virtual Campus metaverse offers indoor and outdoor spaces that emulate different physical locations on a university campus, similar to Tecnológico de Monterrey. This stimulates creativity by offering diverse contexts, changes in perspective, and a combination of visual and auditory stimuli. Some examples are: the auditorium, the conference room, the mountain top, the Tec Forum, and many others.
At the end of the activity, the teams created a poster infographic as a deliverable and published it in the Gallery section of the Tec Virtual Campus Metaverse. Below are some examples:
To assess students’ perceptions of their acquired learning and the impact of incorporating the metaverse, an online questionnaire called METAEDU was administered. It evaluates educational experiences and was proposed by López-Belmonte, Pozo, and Moreno in the article “Design and Validation of Educational Experiences in the Metaverse in Spanish Students (METAEDU) (López-Belmonte et al., 2022). The instrument presents a holistic, multidimensional perspective that considers eight dimensions, thereby giving it validity. The dimensions are: interaction with technology, intrinsic possibilities, accessibility and management, interaction, interest, motivation, learning, and netiquette. In this case, the “Learning” dimension was evaluated.
Results
Below are the results from a questionnaire administered to 49 students to assess their perception of immersion in the metaverse across various aspects of learning. The responses were rated on a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 represented “strongly disagree” and 5 represented “strongly agree.”
A frequency analysis revealed a positive overall trend among students towards immersion in the metaverse. The data reveal significant agreement that immersion in the metaverse favored different aspects of learning. The areas with the most significant perceived impact were autonomy and personal initiative, the ability to process information, digital competency, and communicative competency. The metaverse was perceived as an effective tool to improve various educational skills, with a greater impact on communication, digital competency, and autonomy. This finding suggests that incorporating the metaverse into educational contexts could be a valuable strategy for transforming and innovating traditional pedagogical practices, introducing it as an innovative resource in university teaching, especially in multicultural and internationalized classroom contexts, thereby impacting the development of socio-emotional skills.
Based on the findings of this study, it is concluded that implementing the metaverse as a didactic strategy through the Tec Virtual Campus Metaverse had a positive impact on the learning of university students in the business area in multicultural contexts. This educational proposal, utilizing the active approaches of COIL and the dynamics of World Café, supported the development of essential learning dimensions. This implementation facilitated the understanding of conceptual, procedural, and attitudinal contents, as well as the strengthening of relevant transversal competencies, such as autonomy, individual initiative, effective communication, and the competent use of digital tools.
Reflection
From the student’s perspective, the immersive environment of the metaverse facilitated meaningful cross-cultural collaboration. It also facilitated the appropriation of complex organizational culture concepts and the approach to content with a global impact, such as the SDGs, which incorporate ethical and social dimensions as elements for critical reflection on current work environments.
Likewise, the results highlighted the need to redesign teaching practices toward more flexible, interactive, and student-centered models that respond to the demands of a globalized and digitalized professional environment. However, the results also highlight the need to continue exploring the challenges of using a metaverse in education, including teacher training, technological infrastructure, and assessing learning in immersive environments.
Finally, this work proposes new lines of research on the impact of the metaverse on the affective, cognitive, and social dimensions of learning. It also highlights the need to evaluate the multicultural component as a determining variable, given its potential to enrich interaction, foster intercultural empathy, and promote global communication skills. This dimension is especially relevant in international collaborative learning experiences such as those developed in this intervention. This work also invites the exploration of hybrid models that integrate face-to-face, virtual, and immersive learning as part of a more inclusive, personalized, and culturally relevant learning ecology.
About the Authors
Mariela Carolina Jacobo Velázquez (carolina.jacobo@tec.mx) is an associate director and full-time professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey Business School at Campus Sinaloa in the Department of Management and Leadership.
Claudia Patricia Díaz Sarmiento (cdiazp@uninorte.edu.co) is Director of the Business School of the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Management.
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Editing
Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Editor of the Edu bits articles and producer of The Observatory webinars- “Learning that inspires” – Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education at Tec de Monterrey.
Translation
Daniel Wetta
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