The Metaverse has been the centre of attraction for educationists for quite some time. This field got renewed interest with the announcement of social media giant Facebook as it rebranding and positioning it as Meta. While several studies conducted literature reviews to summarize the findings related to the Metaverse in general, no study to the best of our knowledge focused on systematically summarizing the finding related to the Metaverse in education. To cover this gap, this study conducts a systematic literature review of the Metaverse in education. It then applies both content and bibliometric analysis to reveal the research trends, focus, and limitations of this research topic. The obtained findings reveal the research gap in lifelogging applications in educational Metaverse. The findings also show that the design of Metaverse in education has evolved over generations, where generation Z is more targeted with artificial intelligence technologies compared to generation X or Y. In terms of learning scenarios, there have been very few studies focusing on mobile learning, hybrid learning, and micro learning. Additionally, no study focused on using the Metaverse in education for students with disabilities. The findings of this study provide a roadmap of future research directions to be taken into consideration and investigated to enhance the adoption of the Metaverse in education worldwide, as well as to enhance the learning and teaching experiences in the Metaverse.

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There is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of applying gamification in educational settings. This research developed an application to gamify students’ homework to address the concern of the students’ inability to complete their homework. This research aims to investigate students’ performance in doing their homework, and reflections and perceptions of the gameful experience in gamified homework exercises. Based on the data gathered from experimental and control groups (N = 84) via learning analytics, survey, and interview, the results show a high level of satisfaction according to students’ feedback. The most noticeable finding to extract from the analysis is that students can take on a persona, earn points, and experience a deeper sense of achievement through doing the gamified homework. Moreover, the students, on the whole, are likely to be intrinsically motivated whenever the homework is attributed to factors under their own control, when they consider that they have the expertise to be successful learners to achieve their desired objectives, and when they are interested in dealing with the homework for learning, not just achieving high grades.

Research on student engagement has recently gained popularity as it can address problems such as early dropout and poor achievement. The growing interest in investigating student engagement during the Covid-19 pandemic is reflected in increased publications addressing this topic. However, no review provided research evidence and an overview of existing literature on student engagement during emergency remote teaching (ERT). We reviewed how student engagement studies were undertaken during ERT from three perspectives: (1) the landscape of studies, (2) methodologies issues, and (3) the strategies used to facilitate student engagement. 42 articles were analysed from an initial pool of 436 search results. The findings illustrate that current studies were predominately undertaken in the United States (36%) and China (22%) with focusing on STEM subjects as a dominant discipline. The literature was largely inconsistent in defining and measuring student engagement. In addition, the majority of studies (57%) investigated students’ engagement from the perspective of students, unlike other stakeholders. The most prominent finding is that ERT promoted several important engagement strategies, including motivational factors, teachers’ facilitation, a hybrid learning model, and using learning technologies to boost students’ engagement.