New Life for Corporate Training - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 437

ducted a study in 2007 in an attempt to answer the
question of how many universities were actively
using Second Life in any form. They found 170
identifiable institutions that either owned land or
had an in-world group (Jennings & Collins, 2007).
This number was collected through the use of the
Second Life search tool and from observational
surveys of researchers working in-world; however,
it cannot be completely trusted because institutions
can choose not to make their presence known, as
we will discuss later in this chapter.
Ondrejka (2008) states that currently, there
are over 150 universities using Second Life in
some fashion. Without stating how he determined
that exact number, it could be assumed accurate
because of his previous relationship with Linden
Labs (he was one of the original co-founders of the
company) and he might have been able to obtain
somewhat privileged and guarded information.
However, this number is contradicted by Baker,
Wentz & Woods (2009) who say the number of
universities and colleges from around the world
using Second Life is actually closer to 100. There-
fore, while the exact number cannot be determined
we can infer that the educational community is
definitely using and developing materials within
this one particular MUVE.

3. Some corporations tend not to disclose
certain information in an effort to protect
their image, market share or trade secrets
so, again, finding them in Second Life is
difficult.

In 2008 Taylor and Chyung attempted to ad-
dress the issue but failed to come up with realistic
hard numbers. Their study solicited “Profession-
als working in the fields of instructional design,
training, e-learning, consulting, and performance
improvement” (p. 19) from two existing pro-
fessional list-servs to volunteer to complete a
web survey. Their results found that only 7% of
respondents reported that their companies were
using Second Life in any form. Furthermore, they
found only a moderate willingness to adopt Second
Life as a training tool, seeming to indicate that the
corporate training and development community
is not inclined to use Second Life for e-learning
exercises.
The results of the Taylor and Chyung study is
contradicted in the 2009 ThinkBalm study exam-
ining business value of immersive environments.
This study found that nearly 80% of respondents
are currently working within a virtual environment,
though not necessarily Second Life (ThinkBalm
Inc., 2009). However, these results are misleading
because the study targeted “Immersive Internet
practitioners” (p. 3) and these practitioners would
be more likely to have projects working in MUVEs
than most regular corporate training and develop-
ment professionals. Therefore, the survey results
are biased and should be disregarded form seri-
ous consideration. Nonetheless, reviewing this
study does prove to be a valuable exercise for one
reason; the fact that the study was conducted at
all is very important. It does to show that some
corporate training and development practitioners
are looking at MUVEs and while the use may not
be widespread there is an earlier adopter commu-
nity developing. What will become of this group
and its future use of MUVEs has yet to be seen.

Corporate Use of Second Life

The use of Second Life by corporate training
and development programs is much harder to
determine. This is because the exact number of
companies currently using Second Life is unknown
for a number of possible reasons, including:

1. It would be impossible to determine an exact
number as there are too many companies in
existence to survey them all.
2. Companies can choose to hide their presence
in Second Life and without their direct com-
munication or invitation an observer would
never know they existed.