Educational digital twins (EDT) to a sustainable future? Between promises and reality

The Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 underline the urgency of sustainability in all sectors, starting with the industrial sector. The ambition of Industry 5.0 is to go beyond Industry 4.0, striving for a sustainable technological revolution centered on people (Barcellini, 2019; Julien & Martin, 2021). So-called “disruptive” industrial innovations are on the horizon (Duroch et al., 2022) : they should drive an in-depth overhaul of production methods, organizations, interpersonal relationships and beyond our lifestyles, our ways of working and interacting. So what’s going on? Are these radical transformations advocated by Industry 5.0 in line with sustainability ?
Digital Twins (DTs) present themselves as such ruptures: in 50 years, they have evolved from simple modeling to a multifunctional technology that offers new possibilities for optimizing, simulating, innovating and training (Glaessgen & Stargel, 2012; Grieves, 2016; Zio & Miqueles, 2024). Their deployment has major consequences in terms of education and training: in addition to the new professions that are emerging and translating into specific jobs, these transformations will demand specific skills from all professions well beyond knowledge of digital tools (Julien & Martin, 2020). At the same time, training itself is a field of application targeted by the development of JN, envisaged as a learning environment that opens up new avenues for rethinking pedagogical design (Autiosalo, 2018; Balyakin, Nurakhov, & Nurbina, 2022). For this reason, many establishments and workplaces are rapidly equipping themselves with DTs (Facon et al., 2023; Garcia et al., 2023; Havard, Courallet, Baudry, & Delalin, 2023; Richir, 2024; Sepasgozar, 2020).