New Life for Corporate Training - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 438

A study conducted by the eLearning Guild
might shed the most accurate light on the corporate
use of Second Life. In 2007 the Guild surveyed its
membership on the use of immersive learning sim-
ulations. The online survey was posted in January
2007 and members of the guild, numbering over
30,000, were asked to complete it as part of their
online profile. The results began to be examined in
December of 2007. In total, over 1,100 eLearning
Guild members completed the survey during the
course of that year. While the survey focused on
the broader topic of the corporate use of immersive
learning simulations (e.g., serious games) it did
asked one pointed question on the tools used to
develop immersive learning environments. One
pertinent result was found when the results of
that one question were broken down by market
share. The use of Second Life in the Educational
and Governmental market share was 10%. This
again confirms that the Academic community has
begun to accept Second Life as a development
and delivery tool. However, when looking at the
use of Second Life by the corporate market share
the results were much lower, at 1.6% (eLearning
Guild, 2008). Once more a discrepancy is seen
between the academic community and corporate
community in its use of Second Life. The results
of this study show that as of December 2007 the
corporate training and development community
had not adopted Second Life as to training tool
or delivery mechanism.
This certainly contradicts what one might
expect in finding a larger number of corporate
users of Second Life or at least something more
equable between the two populations. Indeed, it
seems reasonable to think of the corporate world
as being more willing to take risks, more cut-
ting edge and more open to innovation. But so
far that is not the result researchers are finding
in the limited number of studies examining the
issue. However, those numbers might rise in the
years to come based on the growing popularity of
virtual worlds and the proven value of e-learning.

It would be prudent, at this point, to differen-
tiate between university training programs and
individual instructors and faculty independently
using Second Life. It seems that in many cases
individual educators have started to use Second
Life for instruction or research, but the institutions
those faculty members are employed by are not
pushing the use of Second Life in other areas. One
example of this is Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University; while there are individual
faculty members working with Second Life proj-
ects the university itself does not have a Second
Life presence nor does it conduct staff training
in Second Life. In these cases, you should actu-
ally consider university training teams equivalent
to corporate training and development teams in
that fact they are not using Second Life. Mov-
ing forward, I would point out that many of the
same advantages and hesitancies around Second
Life this chapter discusses would be applicable
to staff and administrators of college training
teams as well.

The Affordances of Second Life

During an eight month period, between September
2007 and April 2008, I conducted an evaluation of
Second Life. I traveled throughout Second Life as
Oaktree Inglewood, my avatar, and acted as a par-
ticipant observer. During this time, I took classes,
attended conferences and workshops, visited
landmarks created by educators and corporations,
toured museums, met friends, watched movies and
talked with educators and corporate trainers. At
first I was shocked by the overwhelming sense
of alienness I felt when in-world. I was hesitant
to talk to people or try things in fear of breaking
some unknown cultural custom or practice; it was
almost as if I was visiting a foreign country and did
not know the language or cultural norms. Though,
those fears quickly faded as the full enormity of
possibilities of what could be accomplished in
Second Life became clear.