From Pedagogical Promise to Institutional Fit: Vendor Market for Medical Education Task-Technology Fit in Metaverse

Immersive and Metaverse-aligned technologies are widely promoted as transformative tools for medical education, yet their adoption remains fragmented and difficult to sustain beyond pilot implementations. Existing research has predominantly examined adoption from the demand side, focusing on learners’ or educators’ perceptions and post-implementation outcomes. This study shifts attention to the supply side of adoption by examining how Metaverse vendor markets actively construct and communicate claims of Task–Technology Fit (TTF) during the pre-adoption phase. Treating vendor websites as organisational artefacts, a deductive thematic analysis was conducted on 19 Metaverse vendor websites using the TTF framework. The findings show strong alignment between vendor narratives and conceptual accounts of immersive learning, particularly in relation to skill development, engagement, and performance impact. However, critical utilisation-context conditions, including infrastructure, faculty readiness, ethical governance, and cultural suitability, are frequently assumed or underrepresented. By juxtaposing vendor representations with empirical evidence from the literature, the study demonstrates that pedagogical promise can coexist with weak institutional feasibility. The study contributes by repositioning utilisation context as a central explanatory dimension of TTF in regulated, high-stakes educational domains.