Collaborative and Social Learning using Virtual Worlds: Preparing Students for Virtually Anything

"Teams, increasingly more than individuals, are charged with the most challenging and mission-critical projects. Leaders need to evaluate and motivate from a distance. And the makeup of teams is increasingly complex – they′re bigger, more diverse, more geographically distributed, composed more of specialists than generalists, and much more dependent on technology than in the past. And difficult economic times only accent these challenges." This statement made by Reeves and Read in their Book “Total Engagement” perfectly summarizes the challenge we as University of Applied Sciences and especially our degree program "Project Management and Information Technology" face while preparing students for their work life. While the use of e-mail and video-conferencing systems substantially supports the members of ever more globalized project teams, we have witnessed that the developments regarding Virtual Worlds and Communities may have a big impact on project management in the future. The paper shows what approach was chosen to take the skills already adopted by the “virtual natives” e.g. our students, what tasks were given to them to improve those skills and what lessons learned were made by the teaching stuff.