irtual worlds (VWs) are no novum in higher education but regain interest through COVID-19 restrictions, emerging technologies, and the metaverse hype. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review to gain the current status quo of research in higher and further education to identify the educational activities, research areas, learning environments, technologies towards the metaverse, subjects taught, and the current state of design knowledge. The initially found 587 records were systematically filtered to 89 fully coded articles. Based on our results, we define research gaps and derive research streams. Our results reveal a lack of research on social integration, course design, non-technical target groups, theoretical grounding and general design knowledge within the given context. The metaverse trend has reached educational research in the way that from 2016 onwards, new technologies are investigated selectively for educational purposes.