Online Marketing Trends: Virtual Learning via Second Life

Apparently there's a group at Second Life called 'Real Life Education in Second Life.' It is made up of people who are interested in the educational possibilities of Second Life. According to them, there are more than 400 universities and 4,500 educators participating in the Second Life Educators List (SLED). And this group is studying how to leverage the benefits of learning in a virtual world in order to assist the students of today.



Caption: From Second Life, students role-play a courtroom scene in Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s virtual world campus hosted by Peggy Sheehy in Teen Second Life.

In an article written by a professor of computer science at Colorado Technical University named Cynthia M. Calonge, she notes, "the benefits outweigh the risks associated with venturing into a virtual world educational platform. For me, the virtual world is my preferred learning and teaching environment."

What does this have to do with what our Los Angeles marketing firm can do for our clients? It means is that more and more of our clients need to set up social media networks, to engage with customers, teach them, and share knowledge. And it means that websites need to be filled with content to educate people about what they do and optimized properly with the search engines so that they will come up first on the search engines. And blogs are becomming a way of life.

Imagine the magnitude of virtual classrooms? Futurists like James Canton and author of The Extreme Future, have already said that one of the top ten industries of the innovation economy is, "8. Education and Learning. The creation of immediate, portable, transferable, on-demand knowledge sources on a scale equivalent to the Library of Congress."