teambuilding with eLearning

I'm currently working on a 1 1/2 day teambuilding event for one of Novell's departments in The Netherlands. As I was working out all the activities I started thinking about how to do "teambuilding" with eLearning. Initially I was a bit sceptical, but then I started to think about teams in the "e" world, especially in the world of gaming.

When I was in college I was totally addicted to playing MUDA on bitnet, a predecessor of the role-playing games like World of Warcraft etc. these days. Now in MUDA it was still pretty much a solitary quest to become a Wizard, but in order to make it to Semi-Goddess I defintely had to do some networking with the "Gods" :-) These days however, the role-playing games have much advanced. Battles that are fought are definitely a team effort as Nathan Kracklauer also explained during the eLearning Developers conference where he showed us a really cool team-building simulation his company had built.

So yes, teambuilding in eLearning is definitely an option! Think about online treasure hunts where different teams have been given different clues and have to work together to come to a solution. Or if you are dealing with people who are very resistent to eLearning, have your virtual teams create an eLearning lesson that is fun and interesting and have them present it to the other teams in the Virtual Classroom. Not only do they then have to research how to make eLearning fun (ha!), they also demonstrate it to each other!