New Virtual U - Training

Using Virtual U in Consultant and Training Situations:
Tips and advice on creating 1-2 day workshops or seminars using Virtual U.

by Ben Sawyer
Virtual U Project Team

Virtual U is not only an ideal classroom tool for a full semester, it is also useful for one-day workshops or several-day retreats. It can be a positive tool for consulting with any group of university operation stakeholders such as faculty, administrative personnel, collegiate-oriented sales forces, etc. The Virtual U project team has organized several one- and two-day workshops and presentations based on Virtual U and the results have been quite positive. This article uses our experiences to illustrate how you can use Virtual U in educational settings such as these.

Using Virtual U in a single-session seminar or tutorial
When used in a classroom setting over the course of a semester, there is plenty of time to learn Virtual U and explore its many permutations and possibilities. Often the professors' experiences grow alongside the experiences of the students. In a limited-time setting such as a workshop, one must use Virtual U in a more focused manner to provide a greater amount of facilitation during the actual playing process. The complexity of Virtual U does not afford trainer the luxury of discovering Virtual U with their students. The less time available, the deeper the knowledge of the facilitator must be.

With an experienced player of Virtual U at the helm, short training or exposure sessions can be ideal educational or professional events. From our experience, successful 2-4-hour sessions have included a 45-60 minute introduction to Virtual U by the facilitator (accomplished by playing the game using an overhead projector). This introduction focuses on the major areas of the program and demonstrating some of the basic action-cause-effect loops within the program (e.g. showing how various student admission policies over a 3-4 year period will affect the make-up of your overall student population). Once people understand what Virtual U is and how it works, limited-time sessions work best by presenting a scenario or overall goal to the group and asking them to collectively set forth the policies that hopefully fulfill the goal. The facilitator can continue to control Virtual U and occasionally offer assistance by moving players to screens where relative decisions can be made.

Using Virtual U with a heavy facilitator focus provides the opportunity to position Virtual U either as the focal point of a session or to utilize it as a tool for discussion of larger overall issues. Virtual U provides a stimulus for discussions concerning the interdependence of various university departments, decision-making processes among management teams, and overall introductions to the basic systemic workings of a university.

Using Virtual U in a 2-3 day workshop or retreats
In workshops where more time is available, many people prefer to utilize hands-on play with Virtual U as a key aspect of the workshop. While facilitation is the best use for workshops under four hours in length, when more time is available a mix of facilitation and hands-on use provides the best means to extend Virtual U's use and impact.

For longer workshops we have developed a syllabus based on three basic principles:

1. A syllabus must provide enough training to ensure that each group member understands Virtual U equally well enough to enable their own positive hands-on use.
2. A syllabus must provide opportunities for hands-on play that can spur a mix of experiential and issues-focused discussion.
3. A syllabus must mix in other elements and position Virtual U as a significant but not monolithic focus.

Initial crash course training with Virtual U
The first focus of any workshop that involves hands-on play is basic training on Virtual U. This includes installation of Virtual U and equalization of the skills of group members. Depending on the size of your group and the members' exposure to Virtual U, your group members may have varying levels of capability with Virtual U. This is especially true if you've provided a copy of the software to group members prior to the workshop. Doing so can shorten the time needed for basic training with the product assuming everyone arrives with a similar amount of experience with Virtual U. In turn, this can create more time for higher-end issues and uses.

Our experience has demonstrated that if you've provided copies to students before a workshop, you must first assess where the group members' experience lies. This can be accomplished by a simple Q&A session. If there are less experienced students, we suggest pairing them with more experienced players and running the group through a basic 45-60-minute tutorial. In fact, no matter what level of experience students have, groups of 2-5 people per machine are encouraged as the best way to manage any workshop.

Although our experience is that it requires as much as 20-30 of experience with Virtual U to become proficient, this doesn't mean initial exposure or training needs to be that long. An experienced player and teacher should be able to show people the basics of Virtual U in about 1-2 hours using the following Basic Tutorial outline:

Basic Tutorial

What is the basic playing premise of Virtual U?
Show opening screens, letter from board, and run through a single year, generally pointing out key features of play such as end-of-year budget, actionable areas vs. reporting areas, scoring and performance principles.

What are the main areas of the game?
With an initial understanding of Virtual U's premise, lead students through each screen in the game taking time to define each variable, demonstrate which items are actionable elements, and how users instigate action. One critical aspect to explain here is how some areas allow for a decision to be applied to the institution as a whole and some areas allow a decision to be separately applied to each available department in the university.

Introduce overall game loop, and cause & effect relationships
Finish your basic tutorial by revisiting the game's overall yearly loop and demonstrating how actions taken in one area of the game manifest themselves in other areas such as student population diversity or expanded tuition revenue.

With the basic tutorial completed, further training can focus more specifically on what can be learned from Virtual U. This primarily includes showing some of Virtual U's more complex areas and spending enough time within them to detail the available options, and potential cause/effect strategies that are in play. These include the two most important areas of the game -- the overall year-end budget process and the overall faculty area (especially focusing on department-by-department decisions). No basic tutorial can spend enough time with the budget and faculty areas so expanded training, if time permits, should focus on these areas.

Once students understand the basics of Virtual U and have spent some time working with the faculty and budget areas, the next step is to teach them how to formulate and implement strategies within Virtual U. This requires showing the students how to make assessments based on Virtual U's performance charts. Hands-on time here can be useful, but first providing some demonstration is a good idea. Our experience in limited-time seminars is that this is the final hurdle to overcome after students understand the interface and basic play of Virtual U.

It is helpful to provide some instruction on taking first steps. New players usually have difficulty figuring out what to do first in Virtual U, especially in its open-ended play mode. The facilitator's opinions and insight on a basic "path" through Virtual U is vitally important. Table 1 provides our recommendations for a path.

Table 1: Virtual U Project Team "Path" recommendations for trainers and facilitators

First stop time in Virtual U, focus on going around the campus and developing an overall assessment of key variables and situations. At the beginning, certain issues like student and/or faculty morale and budget trends won't be available. Remind students that 2-3 "years" must be completed for this part of an assessment
After making an overall assessment, players should focus on setting in place key long-term variables (e.g. hiring policies by department, admissions policies, course mix, and endowment spending and investment strategies) that need as much time as possible to provide the desired effect. We especially see the faculty area of Virtual U as the place to spend the bulk of this time.
Once long-term policies are in place, students should focus on getting an assessment of their budget.
The budget assessment complete, students should start time going forward and see how their college begins to take shape. In the first year or two, many long-term policies may not yet manifest themselves. Instead students should be looking for and formulating an opinion about the areas to which they can and should provide more specific attention (e.g. find grossly or relatively under-performing areas such as a weak department).
Once the university is up and running for a period of time and a list of areas that need closer attention is understood, players should focus on what policies and spending priorities can be brought to bear on their identified problems. Students should implement those functions.
Once a student has developed an overall loop of problems and potential strategies to monitor and tune, the facilitator must ensure that students avoid neglecting other areas that needs attention (e.g. the school's IT budget and Internet connection, or the athletics department).

A skilled trainer can accomplish a basic tutorial, intermediate depth in the budget, admission and faculty areas, an assessment tutorial, and help students develop a basic strategy and decision-making path in about half a day. Depending on ancillary ideas and liberal vs. conservative use of hands-on training, it may take a bit longer. But overall, although no student will be an expert in this length of time, you will have a platform that will instigate further discussion and deeper hands-on play.

Building a workshop around Virtual U
Once students have become real players of Virtual U, you probably will have achieved a couple of common workshop goals:

1. Students should have a deeper appreciation of the complexity of a university and the inter-departmental relationships and responsibilities of each department.

2. Students should begin to see the basic cause and effect relationships and "dilemmas" faced by an institution's managers. Of particular importance are the economic impacts of decisions that don't necessarily directly impacts the budget (e.g. how faculty members spend their time and the impact of that on their research production and, in turn, revenue based on indirect cost-rate levels).

This means that basic training in Virtual U should achieve more than just familiarity with the software. Most trainers, consultants, and attendees want more than just exposure to Virtual U. Thus we are faced with the important issue of how to build knowledge from initial exposure to Virtual U.

In the seminars we have produced, the half or full day has focused on the initial game tutorial. We sometimes extend this with a look underneath the hood of Virtual U during which we discuss of the math and data models used in the software. This helps attendees better understand Virtual U and the key observations and real-world situations from which the software draws. All or part of the second day has focused on more hands-on use, scenario-playing, and basic discussion about collegiate management.

A second-part or second-day agenda should focus on applying Virtual U toward overall goals for the workshop. This should result in a determination to what degree that involves deep game-play with Virtual U. Some workshops may revolve around playing one or more of the scenarios in Virtual U and then discussing how and why people achieved -- or failed to achieve -- the desired outcomes. Some workshops may instead focus on team-building, in which case students might play Virtual U for a short period before spending a longer period of time discussing as a group how they were able to make the decisions they made. The key point is to establish before a seminar and workshop what the specific role or use of Virtual U will be. Table 2 offers some suggestions on applying Virtual U to create interesting seminars and workshops.

Table 2: Workshop Varieties

Contrast Workshop
Students play Virtual U in open-ended mode trying to improve their university and then contrast its results or operational manner with those within their own university. Seeks to get players to think critically about their university vs. their "virtual" university. Virtual U instigates critical analysis of the attendees' personal university.

Teambuilding Workshop
Students play Virtual U scenarios or open-ended play as a group. One user controls the product while others offer suggestions and try to build a consensus strategy. Seeks to build better teamwork or provide forum to work out team interpersonal issues. Also useful to build awareness between disparate department groups about their peers' overall role within an institution.

Assessment Workshop
Players are presented with several universities that have been played out over a 5-10 year period by a facilitator. Players must then provide an oral assessment of the university identifying as many strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats as possible. Provides forum to discuss overall assessment issues, and instigates critical analysis issues and skills by attendees. Can also be used to help discuss specific accreditation issues faced in general or by a specific institution.

Scenario Workshop
Players play any number of Virtual U's built-in scenarios, attempting to complete them within the given time-period. Provides a forum to discuss overall impact that various dilemmas and issues have both economically and socially within an institution.
Budget training Players focus heavily on understanding, planning, implementing, and reconciling a university budget. Budget issues provide plenty of opportunity for discussion. More importantly, Virtual U provides a great holistic forum by which to train people about many basic budget issues such as key components, how to read a balance sheet, and how difficult it is to build a budget that pleases all constituencies.

A new way to approach ongoing needs
Virtual U was built to provide a new way for key university interest groups and stakeholders to learn more about the overall operation of a university. We think Virtual U is a novel, relatively complete interactive environment that can accelerate the understanding of how a university works. Critical to its use in consulting and seminars is that Virtual U is focused on simulating many of the ongoing issues the university administrators and other stakeholders face. There is always a need to introduce people to the various aspects of a university -- budget issues, time management, hiring, student admissions, and more.

There are many ways to build training seminars, but only Virtual U injects simulation and interaction into the mix. Its experiential nature makes Virtual U one of the most engaging ways to foster discussion, explore issues, and train others. While it can take time to master, our experience is that it doesn't take long to have an impact. When used in fun and innovative ways by an energetic trainer, it can be an extremely engaging centerpiece to a weekend retreat, professional development seminar, or administrative workshop.