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This paper describes the characteristics of the Virtual Company, a new educational concept developed within the Open University of the Netherlands. Briefly, the Virtual Company encompasses a learning environment that is strongly modelled after real companies; its virtuality refers to its location in cyberspace. The Virtual Company aims to bridge the current gap between learning and working by situating learning in a real-life business setting. This paper presents the educational philosophy on which the Virtual Company is founded, the components out of which it is built and, finally, it discusses some preliminary results of a pilot run with it.
Westera et al. (Sat,) studied this question.