Training deficits in 'soft skills' -personal or nontechnical skills -have long been lamented by educators and employers despite longstanding evidence of their importance. Virtual environments, combined with online learning management and reporting platforms, offer potential for addressing this gap through affordable and scalable simulations. This paper aims to summarise virtual 'soft skills' work undertaken to date, and to explore practical issues encountered by development teams working in this area. The first section provides historical overviews of the 'soft skills' term and related digital training initiatives. This is followed by a case study of an interdisciplinary team of Australian software developers, researchers and educators who have built a series of virtual healthcare products. The case study reports on a number of challenges encountered by the team.

No abstract

The authors’ team has been working with virtual worlds since 2006, deploying them in diverse contexts including secondary schools, special schools, vocational education and training, higher education and the community sector. Here the authors outline their operational experience of the complex web of interrelated factors involved in running virtual world projects. The authors discuss project development models, institutional politics, activity types and working with teachers and students. They conclude that embedding virtual worlds in education can be rewarding but also difficult at times, with qualities of nimbleness and self-reinvention required of project teams.

The authors' team of developers and educators has been working since 2006 to deploy virtual worlds for training within secondary and special schools, vocational education, higher education, private industry and the community sector. During that time the team has dealt with a complex web of interrelated factors in an environment of continual technological and institutional change. These factors include technological change, organizational politics, pedagogical fashions, changes in policy and funding environments, and the human aspects of working with teachers and students. The authors conclude that utilizing virtual worlds for education can be rewarding but is not always easy, requiring qualities of nimbleness and self-reinvention.

In this paper we present the technical obstacles encountered by a project team seeking to embed virtual world-based activities in a government high school. In doing so we outline a number of broader issues connected with working with proprietary technologies, access and equity, working with IT bureaucracies and systems, and engaging disadvantaged young people.