Wharton Dean: virtual worlds are the future of MBA education
by Vladimir Cole 
{ Mar 16th 2006 at 1:00AM }
Occasionally the Dean of the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania sits down with the full-time MBA students for a boxed lunch and answers questions for an
hour. Typically questions involve boring stuff: curriculum, teaching. That sorta thing.
Today, however, I nearly choked on my chicken salad sandwich when I heard Harker state the following (paraphrased, because I wasn't paying full attention when he said it; I wasn't expecting to have to take down a quote):
Wharton's committed to teaching students to be good learners. Right now, almost every business school is teaching students using the case method, with a mix of lectures and simulations. I think that the next big teaching innovation will come from the area of virtual worlds. Think Sim City or The Sims in a business environment.
To hear the head of this typically conservative organization endorse virtual worlds made me feel good. Not because I envisioned clicking for credit, but because I know first-hand the power of virtual environments for teaching some really important lessons. I learned more about organizational behavior and management (and my own deficiencies in both) through my year-long experience running a 90-person hardcore Everquest raid guild than I learned during any day job.
The only thing virtual about immersive, massively-multiplayer experiences is the fact that you can't touch real objects. Everything else is present--especially the group dynamics and interpersonal relationships.
Coupled with a recent exam experience, Harker's offhand comment makes me think that maybe stodgy old educational institutions like Wharton are waking up to the potential of interactive experiences to teach us how to be better people in the real world. Than again, maybe Wharton's actually living up to their own marketing hype. The school did invent modern business education, after all (2006 marks Wharton's 125th anniversary). It'd be nice if she were the first institution to really embrace virtual world experiences in the classroom.
I know that other schools have dabbled in this area, but so far nobody's built a curriculum around the idea that virtual experiences are a viable experiential teaching tool fit to replace or at least supercede the case method.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dave @ Mar 16th 2006 1:38AM
Wow. Leave it to MBAs to figure out a way to make The Sims even MORE boring.
Probot @ Mar 16th 2006 1:50AM
While I'm not an expert about it, I do know of a conference that discusses laws in virtual worlds called State of Play. It's put on by Harvard, Yale and New York Law School, and it's been around for about 3 years.
Official website: http://www.nyls.edu/pages/2396.asp
Blog here: http://terranova.blogs.com/
Actually, Dan Hunter, a professor of Legal Studies at your school was involved with the conference last year.
Specifically, the goal of that conference is to discuss the legal implications of virtual worlds. But I think that kind of discussion is meant to be a springboard for other ideas for the use of the worlds, like the one proposed by your school.
Just as any medium is eventually utulized as a tool for teaching, video games will one day be incorporated into education.
Ken @ Mar 16th 2006 1:54AM
That's actually not that far fetched of an idea. Business academia, especially economics, are attempts to virtualize the real world into something more cognitively manageable (pun intended) in order to create structure and rules for business.
MMO games are attempts to virtualize the real world into something more cognitively manageable for entertainment.
If not Wharton, another b-school should break some ground here and really take a look at some of the interesting things happening in virtual worlds such as the creation of economies and virtual sociology.
vc @ Mar 16th 2006 2:12AM
Probot -- I was actually at State of Play this year. I met Dan Hunter there.
Probot @ Mar 16th 2006 2:14AM
Here's an example of a university using a modded version of Neverwinter Nights in their journalism curriculum.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/14050236.htm
Jago @ Mar 16th 2006 2:15AM
"Wow. Leave it to MBAs to figure out a way to make The Sims even MORE boring."
I think the suits might be the problem...they're stuffy.
Teddy N @ Mar 16th 2006 3:07AM
Wow, lucky you for being at Wharton... I didn't realise that being a 90 person raid guild manager and getting into a good university could coexist! There is still hope! :)
No but seriously, this is very true... another area is in MMO's, where increasingly complex 'virtual' economies could become very useful as test-beds for interesting experiments in the way people behave with money. And as soon as games like WoW start giving more entrepreuneurial freedom to make money, we'll have a massive virtual market accessible to all where everyone will be on an equal footing to exercise their creativity.
Cory Ondrejka @ Mar 16th 2006 9:30AM
Second Life has been used to teach classes at dozens of universities -- including 17 this semester -- including business schools. Virtual worlds in general and SL in particular are such natural fits for teaching entrepreneurship, leadership, organization, and host of soft skills. They also offer all kinds of opportunities to test different business and economic ideas.
Dmitri @ Mar 16th 2006 9:50AM
When it comes to technology, I dont think Wharton could be described as a "conservative" school. If I recall correctly, they were the first academic institution to establish a website and email system (among many other things).
SuicideNinja @ Mar 16th 2006 11:08AM
"Wharton's committed to teaching students to be good learners."
That is what school is for. It doesn't teach you how to be a genius; it teaches you how to obtain useful information yourself when necessary in the real world. You can get ideas from college, but it seems to me that the degree programss really just increase your awareness of the aspects of the career. It's up to the student to expand himself/herself from there.
I believe the idea here is to make the process more interesting. Where the current lecture/note/exam methods are failing, a virtual interactive example can succeed. After being through college, changes such as these can make future students much more interested in the results of their labors.
SuicideNinja @ Mar 16th 2006 11:09AM
"Wharton's committed to teaching students to be good learners."
That is what school is for. It doesn't teach you how to be a genius; it teaches you how to obtain useful information yourself when necessary in the real world. You can get ideas from college, but it seems to me that the degree programss really just increase your awareness of the aspects of the career. It's up to the student to expand himself/herself from there.
I believe the idea here is to make the process more interesting. Where the current lecture/note/exam methods are failing, a virtual interactive example can succeed. After being through college myself, I can already imagine that changes such as these can make future students much more interested in the results of their labors.
DocBadwrench @ Mar 16th 2006 4:40PM
As an administrator with extensive tutorial/teaching experience and someone who has managed a fairly in-depth property in Second Life, I can also attest to the virtues (and vices) of virtual worlds as a way to bring people together and educate.
I have been quite impressed with the potential, though much, *much* work remains to make it more fluid. This is where more formal adoption by serious institutions could make a positive contribution to the concept.
Gonzo @ Mar 16th 2006 6:45PM
It's about time and I hope this is only the beginning.
As it's painfully clear to anyone who's studied Alvin Toffler's Third Wave theory, the educational system is horrably outdated: You see, it was built at the beginning of the industrial era when the powers that be decided that people needed to be taught the basic knowlege and skills they would need for employment in factories and offices of the industrial era.
Now we're already deep in the information age. Most of the factory work in the US has been shipped away, the offices function much differently, and most importantly one needs to work differently now in order to make a good living. Unfortunately the education system has changed very little. In fact the High Schools are still kind of like little factories that make factory workers. I'm not blaming the teachers, they're ordered to teach what they do and they do a great job considering the fact that the school governments and are run by stogy old flakes who are resistant to change.
I'm not saying that every classroom and learning experience needs to be virtual but the way our great grandparents learned & made money won't work for us now.
To learn more about the Third Wave theory (the idea that as time goes on the the realm of human information is doubled in half the time of the previous doubling) and other mind bending ideas that don't really have much to do with video games but will definitely bug you out, I recommend Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson.
kip @ Mar 17th 2006 3:07PM
I think its pretty cool idea if you were to add in a serious economic/real estate model for sim city. My experience workign for a financial software company , we have seen tons of virtual trading and portfolio contests pop up all over the place but they are driven internally and usually have to involve lots of vandor participation in order to run better.
The problem is that there is the sexiness factor for developing somethign like this. The only game that I cna recall that was modeled off a market when I was in college was dope wars, and obviously that isn't somethign you want to use to teach. The other things is that the data is SO expensive and won;t be commoditized at least in a real time or index level enviornment in teh current model.
I think a good followup to this post would be how do you look at virtual markets and howhat sort of models work best. I'm not familiar with MMO's but to throw these ideas out there: do you use second life to create a virtual widget market where a user can develop new tools or does everquest open market system iso ebay to trade goods? Can I become a manufacturer of new weapons/tools in everquest? What if you could, what's a barrier to entry? Why do virtual currency markets fail?
I think the thing that we'll see if that publishers wnat to limit the market as much as they can so they aren't held accoutnable if their system goes down. They'll also want to make sure that they get a majority of capital.