Wharton Becomes First Ivy League School to Launch Programme on the Metaverse

The Wharton School, a high-profile business school out of the University of Pennsylvania, announced the launch of a new, six-week course regarding business in the metaverse including topics like VR technologies and blockchain-based worlds like The Sandbox and Decentraland. The online course, titled ‘Business in the Metaverse Economy’ aims to educate students about metaverse business practices, giving participants first-hand interactive experiences in virtual spaces. The programme will be launched in partnership with Prysm Group which is a popular economic consulting firm specialising in upcoming technologies.

The intent of the course is to provide business professionals a better understanding of opportunities in the budding metaverse economy and better tools to address issues in it, said the program’s academic director Kevin Werbach in a release.

The course will also help those wanting to understand the economic and technological aspects that will help with further development, and how businesses and creators can benefit through the metaverse in future.

With the help of immersive technology, program members will also benefit from the direct use of metaverse technology. Wharton will be the first Ivy League business school to launch such a program on metaverse technology.

The programme consists of 6 industry case studies and more than 50 lecture videos featuring six Wharton faculty, several industry experts and guest speakers from Adobe, Animoca Brands, Second Life, Unity and more.

A number of other high-profile universities in the US have incorporated Web 3 tech as learning tools, such as classes at Duke University and Stanford University providing course completion certificates as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, Wharton’s new program marks one of the first instances that the metaverse as an economic opportunity enters higher education.

The programme has been announced days after the University of Tokyo disclosed plans to offer a metaverse course to adult workers and students in high school.

Wharton has thus created this program to present the needed frameworks for capturing the trillions of value that will be generated in this growing market.