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The purpose of this paper is to help marketing scholars view virtual worlds as new product–markets and trigger serious investigations on consumer evaluation of brand extensions when a brand is extended from the real world to a virtual world and vice versa.

The paper makes an extensive review of studies on virtual world. Further, it amalgamates understanding from well-established literature on consumer evaluation of brand extensions into the emerging virtual world understanding to conceptualize moderating influence of contexts – the real world context and a virtual world context – on how consumers evaluate brand extensions.

Through logical arguments supported by existing literature, the paper provides 14 well-conceptualized propositions that argue that the real world and virtual world contexts moderate the well-established relationships in brand extension literature. It broadly proposes that the relationships between the consumer evaluations of brand extension and its known determinants are stronger in case of within-the-world extensions and weaker in case of across-the-world extensions.

The paper introduces to the marketing scholars an entirely new area of enquiry as it challenges the known brand extension knowledge when a brand is extended across the worlds.

Marketers considering launching new offerings across the contexts of real or virtual world would have implications on whether to extend the brand or not.

Virtual worlds have largely been construed in marketing literature as fictional worlds. There is not much explored in terms of virtual worlds as new product–markets. The study offers unique value in conceptualizing differences among within-the-world brand extensions and across-the-world brand extensions.

Academic sustainability programs aim to develop key competencies in sustainability, including problem‐solving skills and the ability to collaborate successfully with experts and stakeholders. These key competencies may be most fully developed in new teaching and learning situations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the kind of, and extent to which, these key competencies can be acquired in real‐world learning opportunities.

The paper summarizes key competencies in sustainability, identifies criteria for real‐world learning opportunities in sustainability programs, and draws on dominant real‐world learning models including project‐ and problem‐based learning, service learning, and internships in communities, businesses, and governments. These components are integrated into a framework to design real‐world learning opportunities.

A “functional and progressive” model of real‐world learning opportunities seems most conducive to introduce students (as well as faculty and community partners) to collaborative research between academic researchers and practitioners. The stepwise process combined with additional principles allows building competencies such as problem solving, linking knowledge to action, and collaborative work, while applying concepts and methods from the field of sustainability.

The paper offers examples of real‐world learning opportunities at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, discusses general challenges of implementation and organizational learning, and draws attention to critical success factors such as collaborative design, coordination, and integration in general introductory courses for undergraduate students.

The paper contributes to sustainability education by clarifying how real‐world learning opportunities contribute to the acquisition of key competencies in sustainability. It proposes a functional and progressive model to be integrated into the (undergraduate) curriculum and suggests strategies for its implementation.

Climate change, poverty and pandemics are some of the complex real-world problems that are increasingly challenging higher education institutions (HEIs) to equip future graduates with meta-competences that have hitherto not been demanded. These graduates need to be able to capture and operate within complex systems and relationships. By focusing on complex real-world problems, this study aims to systematically review competences and frame meta-competences supporting curricula development in HEIs.

This study applies a systematic literature review according to the review protocol of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. The review process resulted in the selection of 39 articles, which were subjected to qualitative synthesis to identify competences for tackling complex real-world problems. These competences were grouped into meta-competences and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Scientific disciplines commonly describe four competences for tackling complex real-world problems including domain-specific competence, inter-relation competence, intrapersonal competence and normative competence.

This study found that inter-relation competence is in line with all the SDGs, which is considered important for tackling complex real-world problems across disciplines.

A study in a survey design across disciplines and a weighting of these competences in respect to complex real-world problems aligned with the SDGs could contribute to a more consolidated and common understanding of the meta-competences identified.

This paper aims to showcase and critically review the value of selected pedagogies in which real-world engagements are used to enhance sustainability learning in an open, distance and e-learning (ODeL) context in the Global South. The paper considers opportunities, issues, alternatives and implementation guidelines.

The School of Ecological and Human Sustainability (University of South Africa) serves as case study, with blended and fully online learning used as examples of pedagogies. The assessment of these pedagogies uses examples of learning activities and exercises, critical reflections on feedback by lecturers and students and consideration against criteria for real-world learning.

The experiences showcased illustrate that despite challenges in ODeL, real-world engagements can be used successful as pedagogy for sustainability learning in the Global South context. Limited access to ICTs can be mitigated through mobile technologies and free and open software applications, as illustrated by the examples in this paper.

The case study approach and qualitative methodology present limitations, with focus on only two examples. However, significant depth is achieved with the assessment of these examples, while the recommendations and lessons learnt can be applied in other contexts, thus expanding on the knowledge and experience in this field.

This paper showcases innovative approaches to incorporate real-world engagements for sustainability learning in ODeL. Application of real-world engagements in ODeL in the Global South context is original and addresses the need for teaching and learning strategies responding to the digital divide and contributing to expand access to higher education and an Afrocentric discourse to best practice.

The aim of this paper is to present a research approach that can contribute to a sustainable development of urban spaces for sports and physical activity, comprising theoretical reflections and directions for applied research.

This research builds on an urban real-world lab in a city district. It is based on principles of transdisciplinary research and intense processes of participation.

Five projects with regard to sport and physical activity development were implemented. The projects resulted in exchange and learning of citizens and other stakeholders as well as transformations of the social and built environment.

Instead of top-down research and planning this approach enables bottom-up processes in which affected citizens and stakeholders can contribute to sport and physical activity development.

The approach can help to integrate sport and physical activity development and transformative processes of sustainable development in urban areas.

Through participation and involvement, citizens can be empowered and social capital can be generated.

Urban real-world labs are a new approach for sport and physical activity development. This approach opens up the possibility to include sport and physical activity development in processes of city development. Hence, urban real-world labs are able to address an integrated urban and sport development process and can be used for city marketing purposes.

This paper aims to propose and evaluate an innovative approach to education for sustainable consumption (ESC) which empowers teenagers and young adults to improve sustainable consumption competences. This approach combines pedagogical learning approaches such as real-world learning (e.g. experiential learning and research-based learning) with transformative and transdisciplinary research approaches (i.e. real-world laboratory research).

Through a transdisciplinary research design, the authors explore if real-world experiments (RWEs) offer a suitable approach for sustainable consumption education at schools. RWEs are a research approach for knowledge production, aiming to go beyond temporary interventions, to establish semi-permanent spaces for sustainability transformation and reflexive learning. To evaluate this proposal, the authors study already existing active teaching and learning approaches developed within and for ESC and put these in perspective, to define and understand the RWEs.

Insights from a transdisciplinary research project which applied RWEs as a teaching and learning approach in German schools complement conceptual considerations. As a result, advantages, such as the development of core competencies among learners, but also challenges experienced, are illustrated. Though, the challenges found are not unique to the RWE, rather they point out important potentials for ESC through suggesting systematic changes in educational institutions and teaching approaches.

This paper explores RWEs as an active and participatory teaching and learning approach for sustainable consumption education at schools and delivers practical insights and a definition of RWEs as an innovative teaching and learning approach.

This paper examines the three-dimensional (3D)virtual world users’ perceptions of authenticity and trustworthiness in the virtual prototypes and users’ potential purchase behavior in the real-world settings. The 3D virtual worlds provide a new platform that exhibits virtual prototypes as a promotion channel for new products of real-world and online service, where users can communicate “face to face” via their representative avatars.

The authors conducted an experiment in Second Life and collected data in a post-study questionnaire to test our proposed conceptual model. Structural equation modeling was the main methodology.

The research results showed that 3D virtual world users obtained a high sense of telepresence and social presence. The sense of telepresence positively leads to users’ perceptions of online trust in the virtual prototypes and thus increases their intention to purchase real-world objects; the users’ sense of social presence positively associates to their perceptions of authenticity and online trust and, therefore, their purchase intention.

In survey research, the common method variance is a problem. A more robust way is to use objective measures.

A new channel was proposed for businesses to enhance their online strategies that will increase their business value.

3D virtual world is also a cutting-edge platform for remote education, public information service, etc.

This paper initially contributes to the literature that interprets underlying factors in 3D virtual worlds associated to purchase intention in real-world objects. We demonstrated the advantages, i.e. the communication efficacy and vivid virtual design in the 3D user-generated environment.

Traditional evacuation drill is monotonous. Therefore, evacuation drill should be diversified to get more people interested in disaster prevention. Our idea is game-based evacuation drill using real world edutainment (RWE). This paper aims at clarifying how RWE-based evacuation drill is realized.

RWE provides experiential learning as the integration of edutainment and the real world. An RWE system works on a tablet PC and presents digital contents associated with learning scenes (e.g. real world locations) according to a branched storyline.

Story (branched storyline), indirect/direct competition, and augmented reality content provide multi-ending and flexible instructional support and are helpful for diversifying evacuation drill.

RWE-based evacuation drill could be accepted by more people, but a branched storyline should be carefully refined to achieve maximum effect.

RWE-based evacuation drill could open up diversification of disaster prevention education.

The originality of this study is to integrate edutainment, the real world, and evacuation drill. In the long run, this study could be helpful to save lives when a natural catastrophe (e.g. large earthquake) occurs.

The main focus of this paper is to discuss appropriate forms of higher education for building up students' competence for working on complex real‐world problems.

Within this paper the Harvard approach is accurately compared with the ETH approach by discussing theoretical and practical implications as well.

It is argued that the Harvard case study approach is a sensible approach to bridging the gap between the academic and the practical world, but it has important limits in preparing students to cope with complex real‐world problems. In some important respects, the ETH case study approach goes further by exposing students directly to the multi‐faceted and complex character of real‐world problems.

The ETH approach puts additional demands on students and teachers to bridge the gap between university and society with a high degree of responsibility. Consequently, a combination of both the Harvard and the ETH approach might be interesting.

The comparison of the Harvard case study approach with the ETH case study approach is novel. The discussion of educational together with practical implications provides insight to the peculiarities of each single approach together with an orientation for their implementation within higher education. Guidance is given to universities who are deciding what educational means have to be implemented in order to prepare their students for the task of solving complex real‐world problems in an inter but also transdisciplinary manner.

The purpose of this article is to study how real world learning was used to engender and enhance sustainability principles and practices with 11 micro-, small- and medium-tourism business enterprises and 101 university tourism students enrolled across three university courses.

Action research processes were used to focus curricula on “education about and for sustainability”. A participatory paradigm informed the action research processes. The key methodology was qualitative. Empirical materials were generated through lived experiences, reflexive team conversations, team journals, reflexive journals and student learning materials. Reflexive conversations and reflective dialogue framed interpretations.

The action research process found that pedagogies, andragogies and ethnogogies that emphasize social processes of meaning making and sensemaking enhance and engender “education about sustainability” and “education for sustainability”, especially when coupled with real world learning as a platform for social and profession-building processes between university students, course teaching staff and industry, in this case, micro-, small- and medium-tourism entrepreneurs.

The qualitative findings of this action research study are specific to the participants involved. Generalizability to other university and business settings and goodness of fit require further study.

Insights are provided with regard to implementing real world learning in university undergraduate and postgraduate courses by partnering with industry and focusing on education for sustainability (EfS). A demonstration of the effectiveness of action research as a tool for changing curricula is provided.

Learning is a social process of meaning making. Time for real world social interaction is critical for learning. Partnering with industry complements student learning and facilitates the translation of theory into practice.

EfS is engendered and enhanced when learning-teaching engagements are predicated on real world settings, circumstances and experiences.