Real teaching in virtual world
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
IE Business School in Madrid has become one of the first to teach a course using a Second Life virtual campus. The course, Online Communities and Second Life, was run in association with telephone company Telefonica.
Ricardo Perez, professor of information systems at IE, and Jaime Casado, in charge of the Telefonica’s Virtual Campus, discussed with participants the role Second Life and other online based community platforms can play in helping companies to develop brand awareness, off-line sales and community building. IE plans to use the second life platform to deliver future classes in a number of its masters programmes.
“Second Life is a great experiment on how the internet and social relationships are going to evolve in the near future,” says Prof Perez. “A good number of our students are already members of the community, and it is only a natural step to use it in our teaching activities.”
Business schools can use the interactive elements of the community to deliver classes and programmes to an increasingly wide range of participants. Second Life’s typical user is between 18 and 30 years old and more than one million new users are added a month.
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