Novel approach: New Employee Orientation in a Virtual World

Metaversed has an interesting and rather detailed report on a virtual world build by the US company Acellerate. What they are doing is basically to take the curriculum of most of their New Employee Company Orientation (NECO) program and put that into a custom virtual world. Caleb Booker, after an interview with John Boring, CEO of Accelerate, on the goals of the project:

[...] new employees walk around the virtual world, watch streaming videos describing what happens in that area, and can click on objects to get feeds from the company's intranet or flip through PowerPoint presentations. Not only does this make learning self-paced, but it also facilitates the three learning styles: auditory (learning by hearing), visual (learning by seeing), and kinesthetic (learning by doing). Virtual worlds seem uniquely suited to this kind of application, allowing people to pick whatever learning mode suits them best and to walk through it at their own pace.

Whow! This IS a logical consequence of the whole idea of meetings and collaboration in virtual world. Still, the approach is novel and what is additionally interesting is their usage of technology:

Currently they use Activeworlds for rapid prototyping and quick 3D sketches, and Multiverse for the full roll-out. "Multiverse lets you use the full extent of the programming language," he said, "there's so much you can do." It's out on the edge of technology so the tools to create worlds aren't very mature, [...]

Makes perfect sense! Contrary to (still) popular opinion Virtual Worlds does NOT EQUAL Second Life. There are many tools already available. And tool selection should always be done from a professional set of requirements, not by selecting the platform which is "en vogue" currently. This is especially true for closed worlds, where you want to control tightly, who does what and where (and what should and can be done).

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