Using Second Life to Teach About Marketing in Second Life

Abstract

There are compelling reasons for educators to consider incorporating virtual worlds (VWs) in their marketing curriculum. That said, the ways in which VWs can be implemented into the teaching curriculum are many and varied. This article reports on two studies in which notionally similar graduate classes are taught about marketing in Second Life (SL). The degree of student and instructor immersion is intentionally varied: One class is taught entirely in SL, by a technically expert instructor, while novice/intermediate instructors teach the second class in an interactive tutorial setting. Taken together, these studies offer marketing educators insights into developing “full” and “lite” approaches to teaching in SL, thereby lowering the barrier to uptake of the technology by catering to a broader spectrum of both instructor and student competencies, interests, and abilities.

An examination of the equivalency of self-report measures obtained from crowdsourced versus undergraduate student samples

“…SL was not developed for research, but social scientists soon recognized its utility as a platform to study human interaction. A number of the studies conducted have tended to focus on examining the unique characteristics of SL participants (Hooi & Cho, 2014;McLeod, Liu, & Axline 2014), the behavior of SL avatars in virtual worlds (Grinberg, Careaga, Mehl, & O'Connor, 2014;Hooi & Cho, 2013), the use of SL for online instruction within educational institutions (Halvorson, Ewing, & Windisch, 2011;Inman, Wright, & Hartman, 2010), or the feasibility of conducting social experiments and experimental manipulations in SL (Greiner, Caravella, & Roth, 2014;Lee, 2014;Tawa, Negrón, Suyemoto, & Carter, 2015). A handful of studies have used SL as a tool for recruitment, though generally the recruitment goals are directed at specific populations (Keelan et al, 2015;Swicegood & Haque 2015).…”

The use of Web 2.0 technologies in marketing classes: Key drivers of student acceptance

“…Although this study provides a general model of technology acceptance based around the context of Twitter adoption in a marketing class, care should be taken when generalising the results to other learning technologies that are being used by instructors (e.g. Second Life—Halvorson et al ., ; YouTube—Payne et al ., ). Specifically, future research should try to examine the factors of relevance to different learning technologies and their influence on the key drivers of the model derived here.…”

Prioritizing marketing research in virtual reality: development of an immersion/fantasy typology

“…This will become even truer for larger society, as Kurzweil suggests that VR will expand extensively in the 2020s -work will occur in VR, and VR will be capable of fulfilling all our desires, perhaps even giving us options never before conceived. To date, we can see evidence of this shift, with universities holding virtual classes (Halvorson et al, 2011).…”