virtual experience space: how I would train consultants

The educational simulation Genre where students, in a role play, practice some real world consulting/creation of intellectual property skill, or even disaster recovery using web based materials as props.

Let us step back. Twenty years ago, in traditional extended role-plays, students might be given the mission (often in teams, sometimes competing) to reengineer a work process, create a new advertising campaign, or make some important and defendable choices, to develop both Big Skills (such as project management) and Middle Skills (such as sourcing).

To do this, students often explored some created experience space as input to their assignment. This space was defined though prop documents (such fake annual reports) and other items (business cards or mugs of a fictitious company) handed out over the course of the role-play, while typically the instructor plays a role such as the CEO.

Now, with the genre of virtual experience spaces, using relatively commonplace web technology, instructors can create fictitious, scalable situations using large, linked, multimedia, State Based repositories for students to explore. The elements can include emails, video interviews with the CEO or other clips, and PowerPoint presentations, all accessed through a common portal (or portals if there are multiple teams).

Here's the key: only certain links in the repository are available at the start of the role-play. Then new links could open up based on different types of triggers, typically time and contacts..

At certain time intervals, the instructor (or the simulation on its own) opens up some links that create the effect, for the students, of time passing. This could simply represent the start of a new week or, more dramatically, of an external event happening, such as a hostile takeover or the death of a senior executive (which may change the mission). Again, video clips and emails would become available to the role players that were not there before. Of course, time can also cut off certain links, making them no longer accessible.

Contacts are the other core trigger to open up links to elements. If a player in the role-play was reading an email, he or she might want to ask a follow-up question of the fictional character. He or she would “email” the character. Then either an automated system or the instructor would “reply” to that email, opening up a link that would result in a new email appearing in the person’s in-box.

During the beta roll-outs of virtual experience spaces, the instructor has to be “live,” carefully monitoring the queries of the students, creating new information that will then be refined and added to the canned experience in the next iteration.

By accessing this type of space, consultants can learn enough to create recommendations, projects, and plans, even introducing fictitious characters to each other, that can then be evaluated by real humans for anything from evacuation plans to new web sites to IT infrastructure to strategic plans.

Example from [Iowa State University]. (user id: guest, password, guest).

See also training high potential people.