From Traditional to Meta Continuing Education

Introduction

Lifelong learning includes all learning activities starting from early childhood and continuing throughout an individual's life. Continuing education within lifelong learning is used to define more limited learning activities. It can be defined as learning activities organised for individuals to have the knowledge, skills and competence levels they need for their personal and professional lives. In other words, continuing education covers the part of learning activities within lifelong learning for adult learners (Kaminska, 2019). In this direction, it can be said that continuous learning aims at social improvement at the macro level by covering professional and personal learning activities at the micro level.

It can be stated that lifelong learning in general and continuous education in particular are important for the development and vital continuity of all individuals and their societies. Individuals' existing knowledge, skills and competences need to be continuously structured to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Because the skills and competences needed both in daily life and in professional life change day by day. It can be said that the continuity of the quality of life of individuals is possible by keeping up with these changes. In this case, it can be stated that the design of existing continuous learning activities should be re-evaluated to adapt to this change that individuals face. It would be useful for organisations to renew their existing strategies in a way that will quickly adapt to the current era and possible future conditions and requirements (Lang & Giglietta, 2022). Traditional continuing education programmes/models are predominantly offered face-to-face and instructor-centred by institutions. It will become increasingly imperative for these pre-designed or on-demand traditional curricula to keep pace with changing conditions and technologies.

In continuous education, both the needs and desires of individuals and the situations that institutions/organisations need to meet are becoming increasingly complex. The need for flexibility, individualisation, freedom from time-space constraints and rapid adaptation to instant changes is increasing. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, reality (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality) technologies that offer immersive learning experiences continue to rise as the driving force for restructuring traditional face-to-face and teacher-centred education. It can be evaluated that the Metaverse will play an important role in continuing education as it contributes to the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and expertise by providing interactive and immersive learning experiences. It is stated that the Metaverse will be a game changer in how organisations will train their employees due to its different qualities such as enabling multi-sensory interactions, being designed to respond to rapidly changing environmental conditions, and its multi-user structure that can integrate mostly digital virtuality and physical reality (Halkias, Diaz, & Esposito, 2023). In this book chapter, where continuous training in the metaverse is examined in general, firstly, continuous training is analysed as a concept. Then, in the chapter where the change in continuous education is mentioned, the concept of Metaverse is examined and continuous education in the Metaverse is evaluated with application examples in different fields. At the end of the chapter, a brief evaluation of the risks and problems that may be experienced in the continuous education process in the Metaverse is made.