Introduction to the Virtual Mediation Lab

A few months ago, eight Champlain College http://goo.gl/sjVBvl students discovered a new and convenient way to practice their mediation skills - online and for Free.

Their instructor Julian Portilla, Assistant Professor and Program Director, M.S. in Mediation & Applied Conflict Studies http://goo.gl/gzhVH3 suggested them to participate in Virtual Mediation Lab simulations of family, commercial and workplace cases - http://www.virtualmediationlab.com/ with other mediators in the USA and around the world.

As a result, from August to October we have run several simulations with those Champlain College students. In addition, not only they discovered how easy it is to run or participate in an online mediation. They were also able to share the video recordings of their simulations with their instructor, and reflect together on what worked well or not-so-well, and why.

As you can see in this 14-min video with Arabella and Karen - two of those students - everything worked great.

If you are an ADR/ODR student, how do you like this possibility of practicing your mediation skills online for Free, and discover how Online Mediation works? Is an idea that could be useful to your college as well?

Moderator Bio

Giuseppe Leone is the founder and project manager of Virtual Mediation Lab. VML is a pilot project sponsored by the ACR Hawaii to: (1) Help mediators improve their skills and learn to mediate online, by participating in online mediation simulations with other mediators; (2) Explore the next frontier for online mediation – Mobile Mediation. He has been practicing and teaching mediation since 1997. Giuseppe's Virtual Mediation Lab project is featured in the Summer 2013 issue on "Innovation and Conflict Resolution" of ACResolution, the quarterly magazine of the Association for Conflict Resolution.