BizEd

JulyAugust2007

Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58060

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 66 of 83

"OUR VIRTUAL CLASSROOM IS A RICH ENVIRONMENT, WHERE YOU REALLY FEEL AS IF YOU'RE IN A COMMON SPACE WITH OTHER PEOPLE. YOU CAN WALK TOWARD A PERSON AND POINT TO AN OBJECT. IT'S A WONDERFUL WAY FOR PEOPLE TO INTERACT ONLINE." —Miklos Sarvary, director of the Centre for Learning Innovation at INSEAD Now, SecondLife residents can come to INSEAD's unconventional campus to learn more about the institution. Its students and alumni can come to take password-protected classes or to meet for a virtual drink in a local establishment. By tapping into this new medium, INSEAD is building an area where members of its community can interact with each other in a way that's different from what other online interactions have typically allowed, says Miklos Sarvary, direc- tor of the Centre for Learning Innovation at INSEAD. "I'm very bullish about how this platform can help us be inno- vative in our teaching," says Sar- vary. "With video conferencing, you can see the faces of others in the meeting, but they're obvi- ously in another space. Our virtual classroom is a rich environment, where you really feel as if you're in a common space with other people. You can walk toward a person and point to an object. It's a wonderful way for people to interact online." Although INSEAD's SecondLife existence is still in its early stages, Sarvary sees it as a way to bring INSEAD students and alumni back to "campus" much more frequently. "Most business schools invite their alumni back to campus once every five or ten years. These visits are infrequent because they're very expensive," says Sarvary. "With Sec- ondLife, if you have a free evening, you can go to the INSEAD campus from your home and meet with a few of your classmates from ten years ago. This technology makes such interaction much easier." Whether or not INSEAD's exper- iment succeeds, McAfee says that he wouldn't be surprised to see HBS or other schools open a campus on Sec- ondLife. It's not risky or costly, he notes, and it offers a business school a versatile online environmnent where it can both interact with its own community and reach out to an entirely different kind of market. "With something this new, we don't know all the ways it's going to play out," says McAfee. "That makes it all the more important to dip a toe in the water, experiment, and see what happens." Course Develops 'Search- Savvy' Students Now that the Web is often the first place where consumers turn to buy or research products, many companies are looking for graduates who know how to use search engines to attract consumers, strengthen brands, and boost online sales. A new course at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University in Columbus aims to give marketing students search engine savvy. The new Internet marketing course, Principles in Electronic Mar- keting, was created for the Fisher School's Department of Marketing Tuck Goes Interactive in India In May, The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, launched its new global distance learning initiative with a virtual learning series aimed at Citibank manag- ers in the Indian cities of Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. Each installment of the monthly learn- ing series will comprise 90 minutes of instruction and allow the executives to interact in real time with Tuck faculty. The first installment of the series focused on the research of Professor Vijay Govindara- jan's "Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators," and the July and August installments will feature the work of strategy professors Richard D'Aveni and Sydney Finkelstein. The entire series serves as a model for Tuck as it works with other global companies in online learning environ- ments, says Anant Sundaram, faculty director of Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth. BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2007 65 and Logistics by Laura Thieme, president of Bizresearch, a Colum- bus-based search engine marketing company. Thieme points to a recent survey conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization that found that com- panies spent $9.4 billion on search marketing in 2006. "While that's a 62 percent increase over 2005, companies lag in tracking results, measuring successes, and achieving goals," says Thieme. "That's due, in large measure, to the lack of the staff expertise necessary to think strategically about search marketing." The course will teach senior mar- keting majors the fundamentals of search marketing, including search engine optimization, viral and affili- ate marketing, Web site analytics,

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of BizEd - JulyAugust2007