Some of the most important training initiatives also present the most difficult challenges to practicing the new-found knowledge. Safety concerns, logistics problems, and other restrictions limit your options and decrease your training effectiveness. For Children’s Memorial Hospital, this was especially true of training for their evacuation procedures. It is impossible to practice a full evacuation of the hospital, which limited the realism of training efforts.

Virtual worlds like Second Life offer a solution. Using virtual worlds, you can build immersive simulations that mimic real-world events. Children’s Memorial Hospital partnered with Centrax Corporation to build a portion of the hospital in Second Life. Employees of the hospital will use an avatar to evacuate patients virtually and stage them for transfer. This provides an unprecedented level of realism. It also facilitates learning experiences that are impossible to capture with traditional e-learning or classroom training.

• Make sure your initial plan provides room for expansion.
• It is possible to create psychological fidelity (the perception of a correlation to the real world) without photo-realism.
• And, naturally, keep it simple.