A Second Glance at 3D Virtual Learning: Cheaper, Easier, and More Robust
Wednesday, September 28 from 2 – 3 pm Eastern in VenueGen.
Caroline Avey of ACS Learning Services, a Xerox company
Join training expert Caroline Avey, Director of Innovative Solutions at ACS Learning Services, a Xerox company, for this limited-seat, interactive virtual presentation. Learn from her first-hand experience helping clients evaluate, select and implement various immersive training environments.
Discover what’s new in the next generation of immersive virtual training environments
Compare the functionality and cost models of today’s platforms
Learn the major factors that every organization should consider when evaluating virtual worldsvirtual
Only a few short years ago, the learning industry was enamored with the idea of immersive, or 3D, virtual worlds. They held promise of training more learners more efficiently than ever–without sacrificing the engagement and interactivity of the physical classroom. But for most of us, the love affair was quickly cut short by early problems with security, usability, bandwidth requirements, and cost.
3D worlds for business use may have faded from the spotlight in recent years, but behind the scenes, the latest virtual training environments have matured to fulfill their early promise: a viable online solution that’s as easy, natural, and effective as face-to-face instructor-led training.
Don’t have a VenueGen account yet? It’s fast, easy and free to sign up. Just click the Register button below to get started.
Virtual seats are limited to the first 40 people to arrive on the day of event, so register now to get a headstart!
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.
VenueGen, a leading 3-D Virtual Meeting and Training platform provider, has been named one of the Cool Vendors in Social Software and Collaboration in the April 6, 2010 research report published by Carol Rozwell of Gartner, Inc.
As stated in the Gartner report, “the five vendors profiled in this Cool Vendors research demonstrate the breadth of social-software tools. On one hand, they can use the social network to solve problems. In addition, they can provide a platform for engagement in virtual environments that’s superior to more traditional settings.”
Gartner, Inc. names VenueGen a "Cool Vendor" of 2010 for it's e-training app
VenueGen’s 3-D meeting and training platform is delivered as a browser-based software as a service. Users sign up just like a simple Web conferencing tool, and they instantly get a photorealistic avatar based on a picture of themselves. Unlike passive audio and Web conferencing, users are engaged, vocal, and actively participating, thanks to the virtual environment replication of a real conference environment. VenueGen starts at $90 per month, and free 30 day trials are available.
“Billions of dollars are spent each year on business meeting travel, training, and distance learning. The 3-D meeting, collaboration and corporate training markets are accelerating. 3D meeting platforms are becoming mainstream applications,” said David Gardner, CEO VenueGen. “We believe Gartner has identified this trend and we are proud to have been included in the Gartner Cool Vendor report. At $90 per month, VenueGen becomes attractive to every company using audio, video and web conferencing. Our video shows how VenueGen is remarkably different.”
VenueGen features:
Automated setup - Sign-up is as fast as a Web conferencing tool. Users set their avatar profile and their avatar moves and acts like they would in the real world.
Photo realistic avatar – Users can upload a photo, it maps to the avatars face, and people can see you and identify you instantly in a meeting. Avatars look just like their owners. No cartoons, no game characters — you look businesslike, and you get business done.
Positional sound – Drag your mouse left, drag your mouse right, and you scan the room and will see and hear people exactly as they are positioned in the room. This dramatically reduces audio fatigue experienced in typical audio and Web conferences.
Integrated content – Share documents, PowerPoint, or browse the web while you are in the 3D room.
Ease-of-use – No menus, no keystrokes. Users simply right click their mouse, and options such as “sit in this chair,” “walk over here,” “point at this person” appear. Users are productive in minutes.
Replicate the real world – You can be in Paris, London, New York in the same afternoon. Without any video equipment, you can conduct lifelike 3-D meetings with colleagues and partners around the world. All you need is a laptop, and either voice over IP, or any telephone line (standard dial-in like Web conferencing)
Used for Corporate Training & Collaborative Meetings
Corporate training - Put dozens or hundreds of people in a virtual room, sharing content and ideas, and running productive virtual training classes that are truly engaging. Attendees learn more, retain more, and are more vested in the outcome. They leave training classes connected to their colleagues and revitalized, with high recall of information and ready for action.
Meetings – Every business line manager has staff meetings, project meetings, informational meetings and more. Team members are all over the country or the world. VenueGen is used for these applications in small to large companies from millions to billions in revenue.
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.
