Playing With Virtual Money: How Gamification Is Changing The World Of Business Education

“We have tried to use Bloomberg in as many different courses as possible,” explains Renaud Beaupain, academic director of the MSc in Investment Banking and Capital Markets at IÉSEG.

“And the way we incorporate Bloomberg is that the courses are taught fully in the trading room, so the theory and the application are fully integrated,” he explains. “In the lectures, we have about 50% theory and 50% participation where we apply the concepts with data.”

Bloomberg isn’t the only way that IÉSEG is integrating gamification into their business programs—they were also the first university to start using an online mediation simulator in their MBA classrooms. Students are required to play the role of a mediator in an interactive game, during which they're scored on how well their decisions fared with virtual parties.

IÉSEG are increasingly incorporating games into the learning environment as part of a school-wide strategy to make learning more involving. Loïc Plé is the director of IÉSEG’s Center for Educational & Technological Innovation, a center created in 2012 in order to facilitate the development of an online learning platform for the school. Now, the center is dedicated to tracking developments in teaching and learning, and training professors in new ways of teaching.

Loïc is clear that gamification offers an opportunity for students to engage with theory in a way that fundamentally enhances the whole learning experience.

“I would say that it’s not just a question of skills but also the way that they learn it and how much it will be imprinted in their mind,” he explains. “It’s much more involving for the students, and thanks to this involvement you can generate emotions—this is known to have a better effect on learning overall.”

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Gaming as study

At Vlerick Business School, they've also found an innovative alternative to a traditional module assessment. During the Online MBA, students have two chances to play simulation games, once on the accounting core module and again at the end of their MBA as the culmination of their learning.

Maarten Van der Biest (pictured), the business unit manager of the Online MBA at Vlerick, says the game is a useful way of testing their students' knowledge.

"One of the best ways to make insights stick is to do them and try them out," he says. "We never do gamification for the gamification, but it helps to make some of the things stick, or to integrate them." 

As part of the core accounting module, students participate in FAST (Finance & Accounting Simulation Tool), a game in which students take over a company that sells speedboats, with the aim being to guide the company into profit.

"I’m very proud of it actually!" Maarten smiles. "The underlying things that we want to bring across are the more dry things like return on asset, cash flow, return on investments, which are all explained during the game."

The gamified capstone experience comes at the end of the online MBA, with IMEx (Integrated Management Exercise), a management game that takes place over seven weeks but simulates three years.

"We divide participants into groups of four or five people, and they take over a company that just went out of a crisis," Maarten explains. "Then you and your team are responsible for that company, and for every decision made during the first three years." 

Students must make decisions impacting supply chain, recruitment, marketing, and more—"all those mangement domains that you’ve learned throughout the online MBA," says Maarten.

To add a veneer of reality to the game, teams can even be fired at the end of the simulation if they haven't successfully managed their virtual company.

"It’s a unique opportunity to be in that stress but in a safe environment," adds Maarten. "Everything that happens there doesn't have consequences for the rest of their career, so that's a really valuable thing that we give them." 

Having participated in IMEx himself, Maarten knows how immersive it can be. "It can be very time consuming—you are so involved in the game that you want to do everything!" he says. "The fact you are competing against your felllow MBA participants also gives it another element of immersive gamification."

The future of teaching

A 2014 study from the University of San Francisco found that, in a controlled study of two accounting classes at a US business school, the class exposed to gamification learning actually performed better on a final assessment than the class taught through traditional lecturing methods.

Students in the gamified learning class also reported greater involvement in class and a more positive learning experience than those in the traditional class.

So, will gamification soon become a staple at business schools?

While Loïc is confident that both online and offline forms of gamified learning may be useful ways of teaching graduate business students, they do come with their challenges.

He describes gamification as “teaching without a safety net,” as professors have to deal with unexpected problems with technology, as well as the uncertainty that comes with the new learning experience.

“You might have some questions from the students that you may not have the answer to,” Loïc suggests. “There may be some questions that go beyond the course itself, and beyond the knowledge of the professor.

“The professor needs to be aware of that in advance, and they have to be able to admit that in front of the students.”