Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds: How To Create Cost-Saving, Efficient And Engaging Programs (NTC SELF-HELP) - Softcover

Heiphetz, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071628029 ISBN 13: 9780071628020

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2009

Synopsis

Team Building and Leadership Coaching with Virtual Worlds
New collaborative technologies to keep your company competitive, productive, and efficient

With the business landscape changing every day, companies need training solutions that are not only cost-efficient, but engaging, quantifiable and global. Learn how virtual worlds can help you create training and recruitment programs that attract quality talent, build great teams, and connect a global workforce - all for less than your current training budget. Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds walks you through the available technologies, helps you match virtual tools to your organizational needs, and shows why these programs have already taken off at leading companies.

Learn why leading companies like IBM, TMP Worldwide, Michelin, Intel, Microsoft and others are going virtual:

• Revitalize recruitment and new hire orientation to improve employee quality, productivity and retention
• Conduct worldwide training in real time, minimizing costs and time
• Reduce travel while efficiently managing geographically dispersed teams
• Break down dangerous or complex training procedures into manageable simulations

Experts agree that within five years, the 3D Internet will become as important to companies as the Web is today. Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds will put your company ahead of that curve - with great results.

Access the latest information and resources on www.TheVirtualWorldsBook.com

About this title

About the Author

Alex Heiphetz is founder and president of AHG, Inc., a software solution company specializing in business services to training companies and educational institutions: custom software, training simulations, audio and video production. Dr. Heiphetz consults with corporations and universities on the benefits and logistics of virtual training and education programs. He has presented on Second Life as related to corporate training at multiple conferences, such as Innovations in Learning 2007, the Distance Learning Association (2008), the Society for Applied Learning Technology (2008) and at SNY ASTD (2008). His papers have appeared in Distance Learning magazine, Training Magazine and other publications.Gary Woodill is Director of Research at Brandon Hall, a leading research firm focusing on learning, where he tracks emerging learning technologies. Brandon Hall's clients have included Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, GE, Motorola, Kraft, HP, Goldman Sachs, and Westinghouse, among others. He speaks frequently at conferences such as ASTD, CSTD and SALT, and blogs daily at Workplace Learning Today.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds

How to Create Cost-Saving, Efficient, and Engaging Programs

By ALEX HEIPHETZ, GARY WOODILL

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Alex Heiphetz
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-162802-0

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Virtual Worlds: What's in It for the Corporate World?
2 Enterprise Applications of Virtual Worlds
3 Virtual Worlds: Selecting the Best
4 Linden Lab and Second Life in Their Own Words: Enterprise-Related 
Developments and Future Plans
5 Deploying a Corporate Training Program in Second Life
6 First Steps in a Virtual World: Synchronous Training and Lectures
7 Teaching Complex Concepts in a New Way: The Michelin Group Case Study
8 Teamwork and Leadership in Virtual Worlds
9 Doing It Asynchronously: Training Simulations in Second Life
10 Procedural Training in Second Life: University of Kansas Medical Center 
Case Study
11 Recruiting and New-Hire Orientation: TMP Worldwide, EMC Corporation, 
and IBM Case Studies
12 Enterprise Collaboration: The Virtual World Application
13 The Future of Employee Training in Virtual Worlds
References
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Virtual Worlds: What's in It for the Corporate World?

You probably have plenty of technologies already at work in your organization.Do you even need to consider what virtual worlds (VWs, as we'll occasionallyrefer to them in this book) can offer you? In size and expenditures, your ITdepartment already rivals a small kingdom, and your staff is always asking formore. Why bother with a new, "unproven" technology? You have seen more than onepromising tool turn out to be a total fiasco.

Perhaps you've heard that virtual worlds can cut costs. Well, we'll be honestwith you: virtual worlds do not provide cost savings. You read itright—no cost savings. What they do provide is costavoidance. That's how they increase productivity and add to your bottomline—by eliminating opportunities to spend money. If this is not theresult you are looking for, do not waste your time reading this book. If it isof interest, let's see how we can avoid traditional costs without damagingexisting, time-tested processes and, in many cases, improving them.

The mere availability of a technology does not mean that you will benefit fromit; nor does it mean that those in a position to benefit will know how and whento use it. The good news is that, conceptually, virtual worlds are easy tounderstand, and integrating them into a corporate setting is in many wayssimilar to assimilating the Internet in the mid-to late 1990s. Corporatecommunications, information systems, training, marketing, customersupport—all of these changed drastically during that time. The same changemanagement methods that worked then are useful when deploying virtual worldstoday.

Dealing with business transformation often makes you wish you had an extra pairof eyes and ears, as so much attention is required across the enterprise. Wecannot recommend a method of growing extra eyes, but having an efficienttraining program that fully encompasses the entire production cycle will helpalmost as well. Besides fulfilling the need to train anybody and everybody,training deals with all levels of personnel, all kinds of human interactions,and all facets of technology. Therefore, in addition to its direct utility, itis a convenient, forward-looking indicator of the impact of any changes in anorganization, including adoption and acceptance of new technology. Given therecent shift toward always-accessible e-learning, student self-reliance,immersive learning, and simulations, using training as a sensor of change is allthe more attractive.

The Use of Simulations

Simulations have proved their worth since they became a cornerstone of trainingin areas as diverse as the space program and medicine. In this context,"simulations" mean expensive and expansive machinery and software thatreplicates "the real thing" by using complex technology to create a fullimpression of the reality of a process in a trainee's mind. Passenger jetsimulators, for example, use computer-generated, three-dimensional imagesreproducing views out of the flight deck windows. The hydraulic legs of thesemachines are capable of moving the simulator in all directions, and even brieflyaccelerating and decelerating. The expense of building and using complexsimulators—full-flight simulators cost up to $20 million to buy and $800an hour to "fly" (Boeing 1995)—precludes significant growth of their useoutside of the life-critical applications in a few industries.

Fortunately, the past ten years have seen development of simulations thatrequire only a computer and, perhaps, a high-speed network connection. Theystarted out as little more than a series of slides introducing a trainee to aneducational situation. The trainee had to find a solution by selecting answersfrom a menu. Within a few years of their introduction, these simulationsacquired the ability to use and reuse video and audio fragments, PowerPointslides, spreadsheets, and other documents.

As anybody who has ever faced doing several presentations over a short time willagree, recycling old slides can be a great idea, so it is easy to understand theappeal of using such simulations and the tools for creating them. The problem,however, is that these are not really simulations in the sense thatflight simulators are. Within the training context, simulation is a techniqueimitating experience in a real situation, interaction, or process via anartificially created guided experience. The experience does not have toreplicate reality in the way a flight simulator replicates the flight deckexperience. It must, however, have sufficient cognitive realism to work(Smith 1986; Herrington et al. 2007). That is, simulations must interactivelyevoke principal aspects of the real world, enabling and motivating students tolearn.

A simulation does not simply tell learners what and how to do something; rather,it encourages thinking, acting, testing different approaches, and pursuingdifferent strategies. Learners respond to the environment, questions, and otherstimuli so that they can discover solutions on their own after having workedthrough several iterations. This is something best done with an immersivesimulation—that is, a simulation presenting realistic models of anenvironment. Good immersive simulations allow for more than one path to success.Generally, they require (and, therefore, teach) flexibility as opposed to rigid,prescriptive behaviors that characterize other types of learning.

There's a whole alphabet of learning tools, from Adobe Captivate toWink. But virtual worlds are the only type of platform that allows youto create truly immersive situations and the only one where alreadyexisting tools—some of them free—allow nontechnical personnel tocreate highly technical simulations, again helping you avoid the costsof using competing technologies. Virtual worlds are in no way limited totraining: they can be used for collaborative and brainstorming meetings,conferences, human resources management, sales, technical support, andmarketing, to name a few.

Participants represented by graphical avatars communicate and work together withothers' avatars and robotic avatars (run by sophisticated computer programs) tooperate models of equipment or programmable training tools. Unlike simulationscreated specifically to teach one subject, or even one facet of a complex issue,virtual worlds work as a "device driver," providing multiple participantssimultaneous access to a computer-created environment. (Side note: A devicedriver is a computer program that allows higher-level programs, such asspreadsheet or word processing programs, to interact with a piece of hardware,such as a printer or a flash drive. High-level programs do not need to know howto communicate with each particular brand of hardware. It is the device driver'sbusiness to take commands from a high-level program and translate them intosomething the hardware can understand.)

Human Behavior in a Virtual World

Compared with other tools, virtual worlds from the outset provide much greatercapability in creating immersive environments. However, prior to re-creatinganything related to the physical world (PhW) in a virtual world we have to askan important question: do we, as humans, behave in VW in the same way that wewould in our physical world? If the answer is no, then we may as well rephrasethe old saying about Las Vegas, "What happens in a virtual world, stays in avirtual world," rather than depending on virtual worlds for learning anythingserious.

Luckily, the answer is yes. As shown by the pioneering work of Professors MitziMontoya of the business management department at North Carolina State Universityand Anne Massey of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, inSecond Life, people do feel and behave very similarly in virtual and physicalworlds (Montoya and Massey 2008). We can be confident that high-level immersiveenvironments, such as Second Life, can be used for training and other corporatefunctions and the results achieved there can be extrapolated into the physicalworld.

Virtual Collaboration

The most obvious feature any newcomer notices when introduced to virtual worldsis the ability to communicate remotely. Indeed, you do not need special trainingto use virtual worlds as a communication tool in order to quickly build rapportwith your colleagues around the globe. As noted by Christopher Bishop of IBM,"Virtual worlds make geography history."

Communication in all its aspects is the point of entry into virtual worlds formany organizations, especially since it can be tied into both existingcommunication venues and new social media projects. People work together, talk,and establish informal support networks as if they were working in the sameroom, but without the need to travel—an important consideration whenbudgets are as tight as time.

There are plenty of examples of collaboration projects that use virtualworlds—and several successful ones, such as EMC Corporation's recruitingeffort, Microsoft's IT Pros developer groups, and Cisco Systems' use of SecondLife as a customer relations management tool, are profiled later in this book.However, virtual worlds would not have generated such intense discussion overthe past several years and most certainly would not have deserved this book ifthey were used merely as a communications tool—there are many more areasof corporate use.

Corporate Training in Virtual Worlds

Any human activity, no matter how interesting and enticing, has aspects that canbe boring. Some of them can be compared to memorizing the telephone directory,except that most of the time the subject matter is harder to visualize andunderstand. Virtual worlds have proved to be a great tool for training personnelin this situation. For example, Crompco used Second Life to archive informationabout underground storage tanks and train employees on the physical aspects of aservice station (Business-Week 2006). This training allowed employees to betterunderstand their working environment, promoting more knowledgeable and saferbehavior on the job.

In general, Second Life seems to be a uniquely appropriate platform for allkinds of procedural and 3-D visualization training—the kind of trainingwhere other available methods require a significantly longer time and a moresizable investment. Take, for example, the complex and highly technical subjectof enterprise architecture. In a greatly simplified form, enterprisearchitecture can be defined as a conceptual skeleton determining how anorganization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectiveswithin an efficient information technology environment. Even this simplifieddefinition might make you cringe.

Michael Platt of Microsoft (Platt 2009) describes enterprise architecture ascontaining four points of view: the business perspective (processes andstandards of day-to-day operations), the application perspective (interactionsamong the processes and standards), the information perspective (data that anorganization needs to operate, such as documents and databases), and thetechnology perspective (hardware, operating systems, programming, and networkingsolutions). Teaching and learning such a complicated subject, which encompassesall facets of corporate operations, is not easy, especially because it requiresa lot of memorizing of information as exciting as a phone directory. One of thereasons Michelin pioneered teaching enterprise architecture in Second Life, asyou will read about later in the book, was the inadequacy of alternativemethods. As a result, they significantly improved the outcome of training, aswell as learners' perceptions of the subject and its importance.

Using Virtual Worlds for Marketing and Branding

Although marketing and branding can be viewed as a part of communicationactivities, they deserve a separate discussion. Early attempts at using virtualworlds for marketing, based on leading approaches on the Web or in the physicalworld, led to a series of high-profile spectacular flops. As a result, a briefperiod of intensive activity in the Second Life marketing sector came to ascreeching halt as "bleeding edge" pioneers curtailed their efforts and otherschose to sit on the fence.

The fundamentals of Second Life, however, turned out to be enticing enough for afew brave companies to continue working in the area on shoestring budgets.Second Life, as the most populated consumer-oriented virtual world, allows youto quickly and, yes, affordably connect with consumers in places where theyspend lots of time, creating brand awareness and building loyalty. You can dothat by providing inexpensive but appealing virtual experiences (contests,auto-paying jobs, freebies, live in world events, etc.) for your targetaudience. More important, you can begin a conversation with potential customers,learning how to best leverage your virtual world presence for future sales. Inthe process, you will reinforce your reputation as a forward-thinking,successful company and start to build a community of loyal customers. The WorldBank example (see the case study in Chapter 12) shows that Second Lifeis a great tool for reaching a wide audience in a short period of time whilegetting extensive media coverage. TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communicationsblended recruiting and marketing efforts by using Second Life for targetedrecruitment projects, while enhancing branding for such clients as GE,Accenture, and US Cellular (see the case study in Chapter 11). In otherwords, rumors of Second Life's marketing death turned out to be an exaggeration.The lesson to be learned is that simply projecting your marketing experiencesfrom other media into Second Life, rather than designing a new medium-specificstrategy, will probably lead to failure.

Making Virtual Worlds Employee-Friendly

A word of caution (and managing expectations) is in order: you will be wellserved to make sure that the target audience within your organization will notrequire excessive special training in order to be able to use virtual worlds. Wehave encountered horror stories of employees unable to use virtual worlds, andthese stories are often quoted to support a case against this technology.However, these are very much the exception rather than the rule.

There are well-documented cases of Second Life being used by retirees and otherless computer-literate groups. What, then, is the secret to making sure yourtarget audience uses virtual worlds productively, thereby realizing a goodreturn on investment (ROI) from this new technology? Because a virtual worldserves as a layer of abstraction between a user and other users or applications,a user does not need to know how a virtual world or simulation inside a virtualworld works. In well-designed cases of corporate use, you can log into a virtualworld and start working immediately, using only the most basic, generic computerskills that most of us have.

Facilities to make this possible are generally provided by support services suchas instructional designers, marketers, and human resources personnel. Business-friendly virtual worlds provide enough tools to create environments and tasksthat clearly relate to real-life situations, without employees having to dealwith a steep learning curve unrelated to their training goals. Some virtualworlds, such as Second Life, offer a plethora of built-in and third-party tools.These tools make creating environments and simulations a relatively trouble-freeand technically straightforward chore performed via a graphical user interface(GUI). Eliminating a steep learning curve is largely a question of selecting thecorrect virtual world and the correct tools for the task.

Implementing Virtual World Projects

How hard will it be to implement your specific virtual world project? This isdifficult to answer without knowing your specific requirements. But it will takefewer resources than developing custom simulations from scratch, which can runinto hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, depending on the scopeof the project.

Astute developers can create environments and tools as they need them. Forexample, Microsoft spends as little as $2,340 per year to cover the fees for itsSecond Life developer community projects. Michelin and Intel, on the other hand,spent approximately sixty thousand euros and slightly less than a hundredthousand U.S. dollars, respectively (which, at the then-applicable exchangerate, worked out to approximately the same amount), to develop comprehensivetraining facilities in Second Life. Was there a substantial difference in theresults? As the case studies in subsequent chapters demonstrate, all threecompanies are quite satisfied with the tangible and intangible results they wereable to achieve, and they continue to use their virtual environments.

In general, for an average deployment, the virtual world cost per user is lessthan the cost of most other training technologies and allows a trainingdepartment to avoid major costs when used as a replacement for physical worldevents and communications tools.

We have already noted the similarities between virtual worlds and Web projects.It is also important to underline a major difference between early Web projectsand successful virtual world projects, regardless of their respective budgets ororiginal purposes. The difference is that simply "establishing a presence" inthis highly interactive environment does not work. All successful projects mustset up specific goals, clearly define expectations, and work on receiving formaland informal feedback. Interactivity can be a double-edged sword. It worksextremely well when you need to hold a live meeting, training session, or livemarketing event. It can also create disappointment when a prospect visits yourvirtual island and finds nothing but empty buildings.

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Excerpted from Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds by ALEX HEIPHETZ, GARY WOODILL. Copyright © 2010 by Alex Heiphetz. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0071628029
• ISBN 13: 9780071628020
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272