Blueprint for a mashup: corporate education in Moodle, Sloodle and Second Life

In 2005 the Centre for Professional Learning and Development at the Open University (OU) established a pioneering collaboration with Reuters (which in 2008 became Thomson Reuters), working together on The Management Challenge Online (TMCO), a 10-week cohort-based course for First Line Managers. The course is currently delivered in the open source Moodle environment using Flash learning modules, to a model that encourages and supports collaborative participation and deep learning of delegates. This chapter will begin with an introduction to TMCO, providing some context and background to its development, structure and delegate groups. This has been described in detail elsewhere (see Peachey & Walshe 2008), where it was identified that “a Second Life activity programme element for TMCO would offer additional engagement potential for a significant number of participants.”. The chapter will describe the virtual world Second Life and the course management integration system Sloodle before exploring the motivation and structure for integrating these new tools into the next evolution of TMCO. The chapter will propose an adaptation of an evaluation framework originally proposed by de Freitas and Oliver (2006), creating a tool for evaluating the introduction of virtual world technology into a work based training curriculum, and will outline the proposed Second Life/Moodle/Sloodle activity for TMCO in some detail