See the latest in virtual learning centers at The Society of Pharmaceutical and Biotech Trainers 2011 Conference

How would you like to experience first-hand how you can use a virtual immersive environment for life sciences training? Your opportunity to do so is coming up May 11 at The Society of Pharmaceutical and Biotech Trainers (SPBT) 2011 Annual Conference in Orlando, Fla.

That's when I'll be joining David Werboff, Director, eLearning solutions at Informa Training Partners, to present the Instructional Design Strategies in a Virtual World workshop. David has expertise in a broad range of development technologies, media, and delivery platforms, along with extensive experience in instructional design and quality-centered development processes.

The workshop will show life sciences trainers how they can use virtual immersive environments to hold instructor-led training sessions.

Benefits of this approach will also be brought to the fore, including cost and travel reductions, productivity increases, and improved knowledge sharing and knowledge retention. We'll analyze this approach in contrast to PowerPoint-based lecture and passive, non-interactive, push-down of content to learners online.

How to make virtual speaker programs work

Speaker programs are down 30 percent or more at most pharma companies.

Like many aspects of life sciences today, speaker programs are being cut due to budgetary constraints and the tightening regulatory landscape.

I read a recent article by Bill Cooney in PharmaExec that highlighted this trend, reporting that speaker program activity is down 30 percent or more at most pharmaceutical companies.

Many of the figures and trends that Bill reports align with what we're seeing among the life sciences companies we work with. Travel and logistics costs for remote speaker events are a major area of spend that companies are taking a big ax to.

Access to subject matter experts for in-person events is also becoming increasingly difficult due to new regulations that curtail potential for conflicts of interest between doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

For instance, states such as Massachusetts and Vermont ban medical device companies from giving physicians most gifts, including compensation for their travel, lodging, and meals. And if the pending Physician Payment Sunshine Act (PPSA) is passed, it would require medical product companies in all states to report physician payments and gifts worth more than $10.

These factors are driving some life sciences companies to hold speaker programs virtually. It can significantly reduce or eliminate travel costs, and it can be inherently compliant with transfer of value regulations, such as compensation for meals.

In his article, Bill discusses some ways for making virtual speaker programs work. He highlights the importance of sharing content that addresses evidence-based medicine and other clinical topics, and having strong sales force support.

I agree with Bill's advice. We're seeing similar takeaways among the life sciences companies we're working with. I'd encourage you to flip over to Bill's article for his details on these points.

We're also seeing a few other best practices emerging among our customers in this arena that I thought would be great to share. Here are some things they've told us have contributed to making their virtual speaker programs work:

Use a platform that supports high interactivity and engagement. You could say I'm biased because I am with a technology vendor. However, I'm mentioning this point not to plug our product, but because it's something we've heard from many of our customers. The technology decision is crucial to successful virtual speaker programs. Our customers have found it's important to use a technology that's not too complicated, and that provides a high level of interactivity and engagement. This helps foster adoption of the platform, and enables them to meet their objectives of improved knowledge sharing and knowledge retention.

Hold internal sales meetings in the platform. One of the best ways to teach your sales force how to use the new technology is to hold internal meetings in the same platform you're holding outbound KOL and SME activities. This helps the sales team become very familiar with the tool for their own training and internal communications, so they are knowledgeable of the platform when they use it with their customers.

Integrate virtual activities into a holistic events program. We're seeing our customers build integrated events programs comprised of both virtual and in-person events, depending on their business need and the task at hand. For instance, some are finding their virtual environment works well for quick product updates and other more frequent touches. From a time and cost perspective, it's a no-brainer to get 12, 15, or 20 people together in a virtual space for an interactive training update or survey, as opposed to making plans to fly them to a remote location, coordinating their schedules, booking flights/hotels, etc.

Bring organizational knowledge into the environment. Our customers are integrating content, most notably SharePoint resources, into their virtual environment. SharePoint is becoming the standard for document management in life sciences, if it hasn't already. Sharing and collaborating on these resources is a crucial part of KOL and SME programs, making it an imperative to have them available in their virtual workplace.

Measure results and make adjustments. Our customers are showing a high level of interest in surveying to understand what worked and what didn't with their virtual speaker program approaches. We're seeing more customers use the polling function in ProtoSphere, which can be customized with a series of questions to gather information on user experience and feedback. This information is crucial to improving their virtual speaker programs.

These are the some of the common pieces of feedback we're hearing from our customers. If you've participated in a virtual speaker program, what have you found to work and not work? Anything you'd recommend?

New white paper: Life sciences training scenarios in virtual immersive environments

We've put together a new white paper for life sciences trainers to help them better understand how they can use virtual immersive environments to provide more effective training programs to their organization in less time and for less cost.

"How Virtual Immersive Environments (VIEs) Address Learning Challenges in Life Sciences" is packed with specific, detailed scenarios of how trainers can use VIEs to hold key opinion leader meetings, conduct scientific poster sessions, share clinical study research, and more.

It's penned by Brian Miller, Learning Strategy and Technology Consultant for Learning Mind. Brian has worked in the corporate learning and development industry for 17 years, nine of which he spent in pharmaceuticals. He's held a range of roles through his career, including trainer, instructional designer, e-learning developer, project manager, senior-level learning manager, and strategic consultant.

Through the scenarios he paints in his white paper, Brian underscores how virtual immersive environments can help trainers improve knowledge sharing, knowledge retention, and real-time collaboration. It's worth a read for anyone interested in gaining a grasp of the benefits virtual immersive environments can bring to not only life sciences companies, but many other enterprises as well.

You can download it for free now. And if you have questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.

Avatar: your key to equal contribution and opportunity

Much has been discussed and written about virtual environments achieving levels of immersion and interactivity that rival (and some believe exceed) face-to-face meetings. Much has also been written about increasing the retention of information shared in world.

Interacting in a virtual environment

But to many, the whys and hows surrounding this remain a mystery. Perhaps the most crucial, yet most misunderstood element driving such a high degree of engagement is the avatar.

An avatar projects individuals in the first person, allowing them to enter a common environment -- a conference room, classroom, etc. -- with other people and data sources. This achieves common presence, togetherness, and equality, enabling a high degree of interaction and sharing to occur.

It creates an any (person) to any (person or content) to any (time) scheme that is fundamental to highly interactive and productive encounters.

Attending a Web conference

Contrast this approach to the typical Web conferencing session that we have all endured. Each individual remains in their own separate and unique setting. It could be their office, home, hotel room, airport, or local coffee shop. And they stay there by themselves.

By its very construct, Web conferencing is based on a scheme of broadcast -- one person controlling and presenting to a group of dispersed individuals. Is that interaction? Is that equality of function? Or is that a one-person, hierarchical approach to collaboration?

This achieves a very interesting and counterproductive result. By limiting or preventing participants from dynamically interacting, sharing ideas, accessing content, and equally contributing to the task(s) at hand, traditional Web conferencing reinforces the sense of fragmentation and disconnection. Perhaps that is the key reason why a one (desktop) to many (participants) dynamic quickly leads to participant tune-out.

It might sound a little goofy, but your avatar is your key to equality. It provides you the freedom to engage and contribute when and how you choose.

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that avatars are perhaps the most important human factor in virtual immersive environments. By dynamically connecting the right people to the right content at the right time, avatars enable the types of unrestricted interactions we all demand when tasked with contributing to a group initiative.

What do you think, and what's been your experience? How essential are avatars to real online collaboration?

Collaboration Advantages of 3-D Virtual Immersive Environments, by Karl Kapp

You might have noticed the button on the side of our blog where you can download a new white paper by Karl Kapp. His piece, Collaboration Advantages of 3-D Virtual Immersive Environments, discusses global industry's increasing focus on collaboration.

He details the elements of successful collaboration, and how 3-D virtual immersive environments (VIEs) can help organizations share content, generate ideas, and solve problems across geographically dispersed teams. Karl's white paper covers the bases regarding the benefits of virtual immersive environments, and it's well-worth a read.

Also, feel free to share the white paper with others. But please, if you could, share the download link, rather than forwarding the white paper itself around. As you might already realize, we're trying to collect the e-mail addresses of those interested in this subject matter, so we can better understand the market for immersive environments and what's driving interest.

So without further ado, enjoy Karl's white paper!

KAPPTURED: Karl Kapp covers the benefits of VIEs

Tandberg's desktop video conferencing tool: Once telepresence, always telepresence

CAMERA READY? Many enterprise users say no

I don't really have an axe to grind with Tandberg. But it just seems every time I see news about Tandberg and the way it sells video, my alarm bells go off.

So with apologies and all due respect to the good folks at Tandberg, I really need to respond to their recent announcement.

The company released desktop telepresence solution, EX90 the other week. I have two main thoughts on it.

First off, it might be a step in the right direction as far as enterprise collaboration goes. Any tool that reduces costs and increases efficiency can be advantageous for enterprise users.

But it still doesn't solve the broad distribution and enterprise penetration issue surrounding telepresence. At the risk of being repetitive, there are a lot of reasons I don't see all employees in an organization using video every time they want to collaborate. Rather than rehash all my viewpoints, I'll refer you back to some of my previous posts on telepresence.

This also brings to mind an article written by Kishore S. Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at Accenture. He penned a piece for the company's Outlook journal last month, saying, "Now, a new medium, the videoconference, is rapidly emerging as an important way for executives to communicate with their employees, upper management and customers. By understanding the medium and mastering its dynamics, you can significantly improve your effectiveness as an executive."

Pharmaceutical's first virtual poster session featured in Pharma Magazine

Our case study about a global pharmaceutical firm conducting a virtual poster session in ProtoSphere opened the eyes of the editors of Pharma Magazine. They invited me to contribute an article covering the story. It's out now in the current issue, or you can read it online.

If you've ever been part of a poster session, you're probably familiar with the logistical challenges and costs involved. But with ProtoSphere, this firm was able to save these costs AND headaches.

The company's IT team did a study afterward to measure the effectiveness of the virtual event, and this stat jumped out at me: Eighty-three percent of attendees said the virtual event was the same or better than meeting in the real world.

I think this firm's case study gives other pharmaceutical and life sciences enterprises a starting ground for exploring how they can use virtual worlds for their own poster sessions, and in other areas of their business. If you're interested in learning how they did it, turn your eyes to the article.

POSTED: Pharma Magazine covers industry's first virtual poster session

FutureWork Institute's Margaret Regan on why 3-D virtual worlds are the future of workforce diversity and inclusion

Many HR departments have striven to foster work/life balance, increase workplace diversity, and develop ways all employees can make productive contributions to the company, also called "inclusion." But reduced staff and slashed budgets are making these goals increasingly challenging to achieve.

FutureWork Institute, however, is taking a new approach to helping companies create flexible, inclusive workplaces. The organization consults to major global companies in the areas of diversity and work/life assignments. And lately, President and CEO Margaret Regan is championing 3-D virtual worlds as the future of diversity, inclusion, learning, and collaboration.

We interviewed her to learn more, and you can listen to the podcast above. Margaret gives us her take on why 3-D is better than 2-D for fostering workplace diversity and inclusion:

"Without a doubt, we have found that there's a different kind of learning that occurs in the 3-D world," she says. "You know you're at your desk or at home, but you actually feel like you are in the virtual world and the learning is more immediate ... learning seems to be retained better."

Margaret also talks about the Virtual Diversity and Inclusion Networking Event she held, which covered the use of ProtoSphere, Unisfair, and Second Life for large-scale meetings and global conferences.

And if you're an early adopter of 3-D virtual worlds and trying to get C-suite buy-in, Margaret has some advice. She shares what she says to people who believe 3-D virtual worlds are just for playing games, and are afraid the technology has a steep learning curve.

Hit play for the scoop.