VenueGen CEO, David Gardner will be speaking virtually at the physical conference in San Diego at 1:15 ET January 10th. He will be joined by two other virtual industry CEO’s discussing the value of greater online engagement, what audiences/use cases are the best fit for immersive modalities and where online immersion creates the greatest ROI.
David Gardner, CEO of VenueGen
Although the VEW conference have been an annual physical event for years, this is the first time one of the presenters has presented virtually at the event. “There’s certainly some irony in flying each year to a physical conference about meeting virtually”, Gardner states. This milestone is yet another indicator that immersive technologies have matured and are ready for the enterprise. Gardner will be using the VenueGen platform for his virtual appearance, content and audience interaction.
VenueGen CEO and President will explore how virtual environments can make distance education as powerful as face-to-face instruction
(Research Triangle Park, NC: June 3, 2011) “Virtual instructor-led training (ILT) and distance education programs are only as powerful as their ability to truly engage dispersed teams,” says David Gardner, CEO and creator of VenueGen (www.VenueGen.com), an immersive virtual classroom and collaboration lab. “If learners are less involved, engaged, and present in the e-classroom than they are in the physical classroom, then where’s the ROI of going virtual? Even if you reduce travel and time out-of-field, a disengaged workforce is less effective and more costly over time.”
Gardner and VenueGen President Jeff Crown will explore this gap between face-to-face and virtual ILT, as well as the potential of new immersive e-classroom platforms to finally bridge it, with a presentation titled “Making Virtual Environments Work for Distance Education” at two June 2011 conferences.
Gardner will speak Thursday, June 9 at the International Conference for eLearning in the Workplace (ICELW) 2011, from 2 – 3 pm EDT at Columbia University in New York, NY. To learn more about the Conference or to register to attend, please visit www.icelw.org.
Crown’s presentation will take place at eLearning DEVCON 2011 in Salt Lake City, UT Wednesday, June 15 from 11:30 am – 12:15 pm as part of the conference’s Project Management track. Conference and registration information is available at www.elearningdevcon.com.
Making Virtual Environments Work for Distance Education will explore the following topics:
The value of immersive virtual training environments—beyond simply reducing travel costs—to enterprise organizations;
The strengths and weaknesses of currently available immersive technologies;
How to utilize these technologies to demonstrate measurable impact on learning;
Common mistakes and pitfalls encountered when adopting virtual environments for ILT;
Risks and critical success factors that should be considered when planning online learning strategies.
For more information, or to schedule an interview or meeting with Gardner or Crown at the events, please contact Kate Hendrick by phone at 919-727-9089, by email at khendrick@venuegen.com, or via Twitter at www.twitter.com/venuegen.
April 25, 2011. 2 pm ET / 11am PT. Visit TrainingIndustry.com to watch the recording.
A special, limited-seat encore presentation will take place Wednesday, May 25 at 2pm Eastern in VenueGen.Contact us for an invitation.
In an effort to drive efficiency, many of us are exploring virtual environments for instructor-led training. But virtual ILT platforms, particularly those originally designed for web conferencing, can feel more like a barrier to learning than a solution. To improve learning outcomes online, the e-classroom must be just as engaging as the physical classroom.
Join us for this informative and challenging TrainingIndustry.com webinar, sponsored by VenueGen, as we tackle the problem of moving ILT online without sacrificing the engagement and outcomes of face-to-face learning.
In this free, one-hour webinar, we’ll draw from real-world solutions and learning psychology to:
Quantify what engagement is and why it is so critical to learning outcomes;
Identify the four subtle but crucial components that foster engagement in learning environments;
Rank various modalities as to their engagement effectiveness
Abstract: Virtual educators know how difficult it is to maintain control over learners’ attention. Without the interpersonal cues and interactions we share when communicating face-to-face, the learning experience can feel unnatural and disengaging, extracting a heavy toll on knowledge transfer.
But why do virtual programs often seem less conducive to learning than ILT? The missing element is engagement. This session will examine:
The crucial nature of engagement to successful learning environments;
The four factors for creating engagement;
The ability of various online modalities to engage
How the immersive web can help simply and cost-effectively replicate the in-person experience.
Speaker Bio: David Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, technology investor and futurist with a proven track record of early identification of paradigm-shifting technologies. He is a trusted advisor concerning new technology trends who believes Web-3D is on the verge of dramatically transforming many web-based business models as we know them today.
Experienced in taking IT products and Internet-service model companies to market, Gardner has founded seven technology companies—including PeopleClick, the first hosted software-as-a-service enterprise application; and healthcare communications technology exchange ProviderLink, now owned by Compuware—without a single failure or loss of investor funds. He has served on several boards, spoken at multiple industry conferences, and published over twenty forward-thinking papers and articles on technical, business and managerial topics.
In 2007, Gardner founded VenueGen (www.VenueGen.com), a company dedicated to creating a new standard of in-browser web-conference platform for more engaging, productive and efficient online training, meetings and events. He currently serves as CEO.
For more information about how to catch the presentation, visit the VWBPE Conference website or contact Kate Hendrick, director of marketing at VenueGen.
EXCERPT: Chris Lineberry is the principal of the Florence Virtual Academy in Florence, Arizona.
Chris Lineberry
“One of the problems with online schooling is building a sense of community,” he said. So the school decided to use the VenueGen Web-based meeting platform because it offered the ease of use and security his school needed at an affordable price. “This gives us a real ability to reach students,” he said.
Immersion.VenueGen users get a sense of immersion – of “actually being there” – when they attend virtual events on the platform. As a result, it helps bring students together who are located around the school district, or, in fact, anywhere in the state. The school also holds all its staff meetings in VenueGen, as well as meetings between teachers and students.
Staff meeting in VenueGen. (Image courtesy Chris Lineberry.)
“What I really like about it is the sense of immersion that the kids and the staff are able to get from it,” he said. The schools serves a wide variety of students…But they know the value of a high school diploma and a quality education,” he said.
ONE+ ‘s Jason Hensel talks with VenueGen CEO David Gardner about the usability and user-engagement advantages of immersive web technologies. “You recognize people on-site. You can see who’s talking. When everyone turns and looks at you, your energy level spikes. It feels just like being in a real meeting.”
Creating engagement via Web conference is challenging even with small groups, and large groups can be almost prohibitively difficult to monitor. The ideal solution would recreate the natural engagement and interactivity of face-to-face instructor-led training (ILT) in a way that’s as easy, convenient, and accessible as Web conferencing. A handful of up-and-coming companies are introducing Web 3-D apps as a potential solution. They look similar to Second Life in certain basic ways, but are super-intuitive to use and are designed specifically for business use in terms of scalability, participant control, usability, and multi-screen, low-bandwidth content-sharing (a useful feature that ’2-D Web conferencing platforms don’t provide).
The best of these platforms have gone to great effort to recreate the essence of face-to-face communication, without a user learning curve, for better online learning. For example, they feature directional, actual-distance (but adjustable) sound, which studies indicate is crucial to the brain’s ability to quickly absorb information.
They also allow both learners and instructors to be in control of all the non-verbal communicators we semi-consciously use in-person that contribute to an engaging sense of presence. Instructors can tell by sight when learners are focused and engaged from anywhere inside the 3-D training room (and learners know it, so they’re naturally more engaged).
Collaboration flows more freely with more people participating and fewer people talking over one another or ‘checking out.’ Because they’re virtually sitting among their easily identifiable peers instead of alone in front of a 2-D Web conference, learners are more accountable for their presence, so they become more engaged in the course objectives. In essence, being in one of these Web 3-D environments ‘feels’ natural, so both training and learning become almost as naturally engaging as they are with in-person ILT.
- Kate Hendrick, director of marketing for VenueGen
In 2009, the Cisco Global Sales Experience demonstrated the power of games to engage audiences and impart learning. In this guest post by David Gardner, CEO of VenueGen, David highlights why gaming and business are a perfect match. David is also speaking on “3D Immersive Worlds for Business Engagement” on January 12, 2011 from 11:00 – 11:45 am.
David Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, technology investor and futurist. With a proven track record for early identification of paradigm-shifting technologies, Gardner has successfully built seven companies. He is a trusted advisor concerning new technology trends who believes the 3D web is on the verge of dramatically transforming many web-based business models as we know them today
David Gardner, CEO of VenueGen
To the average business person, the word “gaming” probably seems irrelevant, especially when used in the same sentence as “a more productive, innovative, strategically unified workforce.” But it makes perfect sense for business objectives and gaming to go hand-in-hand. Why? Because while most every company is looking to cut costs by moving training, meetings and events online, today’s 2D web conference solutions just can’t match the engagement we experience when we’re physically face-to-face. And without engagement, ideas don’t connect and information just doesn’t sink in.
Virtual games, on the other hand, have been engaging people from afar for years. So why not embrace their use for business? What business needs to understand is that it’s not just the high-speed car chases or alien massacres that engage people in virtual games. Rather, a game’s storyline is akin to a corporate meeting agenda, or content for a training course. Obviously, the material must be relevant and maybe even a little exciting to be engaging. But even the most popular courses and topics become lackluster when presented as flat slides accompanied by faceless voices. To further the metaphor, expecting engagement from a web conference is kind of like expecting it from a video of a stranger playing Halo.
So what else drives engagement beyond the ‘storyline’? The missing link is individual control. With gaming, each player has a sense of shaping his or her own virtual experience while (especially in team-player games) contributing to a common goal. Similarly, when we communicate face-to-face, we’re in control not only of what we say and when we speak, but also of our facial expressions, our body language, where we direct our attention, our perception of others and their perception of us, and countless other subtle, semi-conscious gestures whose maintenance keeps us alert, interested, and above all, engaged. Isn’t this exactly what’s missing from our virtual classrooms, events and meetings?
To find out, creators of a new breed of in-browser 3D environments are enabling high levels of personal control for online business communications. These applications feature simple, intuitive usability, and are meant to “disappear” once a user becomes accustomed to them, so that he or she can become fully immersed in a virtual world of natural-esque business collaboration and learning. So far, there’s evidence that gaming and business are a great match. Happy users report improved collaboration, communication, retention and long-term transfer of learning.
Attendees at one of the seminars at this year’s Virtual Edge Summit in Las Vegas were amazed at the 3D technology that’s now on the market for virtual meetings and events.
Comments such as: “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” were uttered during the demonstration by David Gardner, chief executive of VenueGen – and this was despite a technology malfunction that meant it had to be cut short.
What delegates saw were 3D virtual meetings populated by avatars, but more life like than people are used to seeing in environments such as Second Life. What’s more, the avatars had the faces of the people they were representing, with the 3D immersive technology creating a real feeling of the presence of others in the meeting.
What was clear to Gardner’s audience was how much more engaging an environment VenueGen’s 3D event was compared to the two dimensional versions that are becoming increasingly widespread. And it is this increased level of engagement that Gardner believes makes meetings held in a 3D environment much more effective.
“Analysts Gartner and Forrester both predicted the rise and widespread adoption of Web3D by 2010,” said Gardner. “This was the hype cycle, and what people found was that the technology was difficult to build, couldn’t negotiate firewalls easily or be downloaded quickly enough. Plus it was complex to use and expensive. But now we’ve hit the five-year point, I believe all these issues have been resolved.
“But one key issue remains – we have failed to make the case for how important engagement is to online meetings. It’s very hard to measure, but last year $350 billion dollars was lost through disengaged staff, according to research.
“Why would people spend so much on Telepresence, when WebEx was so cheap? Because it is engaging and 2D screen sharing is not.”
So what about the cost of 3D immersive meetings technology? Well Gardner was keen to point out that is has become very affordable.
“Web3D can be installed in under a minute, learned in 30 seconds and is cheaper that WebEx,” he said.
So after a five-year wait, perhaps Gardner may well see his vision for the future of corporate meetings come to fruition in 2011.
