CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1698260
This article is part of the Research TopicFuture Places of Learning and Higher Education: a Humanistic Perspective.View all 6 articles
Learning Ethics through the Metaverse: Challenges and Responsible Educational Design Solutions
Provisionally accepted
- Østfold University College, Halden, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This conceptual paper explores the potential of learning and teaching ethics in the Metaverse. This argument will be developed by exploring two different perspectives. The first perspective situates the paper within a broader context and discusses five challenges that arise from using the Metaverse. These challenges include the impact of new technologies on ethics, establishing trust in the Metaverse, accessibility to Metaverse technologies, how institutions engage in power plays to influence and set norms for ethical standards, and issues related to data ownership and intellectual property. The second perspective considers and conceptualizes four responsible educational design solutions that can be applied to facilitate learning ethics within the Metaverse. This means addressing the extent to which the Metaverse can support transformative learning, identity experimentation, immersive technology-enhanced learning, and collaborative approaches. Taken together, these perspectives provide a starting foundation and research contribution for creating an alternative pedagogical and practical framework that reconceptualizes the Metaverse as pedagogical space for reflective–practical sensemaking and exploration about ethics in education.
Keywords: Metaverse, Ethics, Education, design solution, Reflection, Immersive
Received: 03 Sep 2025; Accepted: 15 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Haugsbakken, Hagelia and Bergsjø. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Halvdan Haugsbakken, halvdan.haugsbakken@hiof.no
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.