A Second Life for Higher Education? By Karine Joly June 2007

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Adopted already by IBM, Dell, American Apparel, Toyota, and even presidential candidates for their marketing campaigns, Second Life could also be used as a new marketing channel for admissions, alumni relations, or institutional advancement.

"I'm waiting to see colleges start leveraging SL as a recruiting tool," says C. C. Chapman, vice president of New Marketing at crayon, a real-life marketing company based in SL, and the former digital marketing manager at Babson College (Mass.). Chapman thinks IHEs should integrate SL into their overall outreach strategy by showing their viewbooks or offering live conversation with admission staff in-world.

Vassar College (N.Y.) has opened a private island in SL to explore these possibilities. On Vassar Island, visitors can tour the place using an auto-guided flying vehicle, get general information about the private liberal arts college, and even leave comments on virtual message boards installed on the path to the Media Garden of Vassar Island.

Miles away, in real life, the Masters of Digital Media Program based at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, Canada, prepares to welcome its first class this fall in a brand new building. It has already offered seminars and even an open house in the virtual replica of the CDM located on its Second Life campus. "It was an obvious decision to hold our first MDM open house simultaneously on our own physical campus and in Second Life," says Gerri Sinclair, CDM executive director. "The results for both events were fantastic; we were filled to capacity both in our own Conference Center in RL and at our virtual Center in SL."

While Sinclair's outreach experience with SL has been very successful, she warns that it's not enough to build a virtual campus and then let it sit empty most of the time. "Building an effective educational environment in SL is very intensive in terms of time and human capital requirements, and it is by no means cheap," she says.

Before your institution jumps into Second Life and buys its own private island, it's probably a good idea to follow Alan Levine's advice. The director for Member and Technology Resources at NMC recommends exploring as many other locations as possible both to see the types of activities and virtual facilities created and to better understand the experience of being and communicating in a virtual world.

If you're thinking about an SL presence for your institution, definitely take some time for your own second life.

Karine Joly is the web editor behind www.college webeditor.com, a blog about higher ed web marketing, public relations, and technologies. She is also a web editor for an East Coast liberal arts college as well as a consultant on web projects for other institutions.

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