“The future of a nation lies in the quality of education for young people. We live in a digital age where the crucial question is how to build data-driven professionals to help companies make better decisions. The best way is to connect the concepts of theory with practice.” Says Dr. Violeta Cvetksoka from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Faculty of Economics – Skopje, North Macedonia.
Since its early founding in 2013, MonsoonSIM has grown to be an award-winning cloud-based business simulation and gamification education platform. MonsoonSIM advances the development of entrepreneurial mindsets and critical-thinking skills in a business environment through leveraging educational technology to enhance an integrated and holistic learning experience.
As an immersive platform with unique, innovative features (the AI-based teaching assistant, data analytics, and dual teaching mode between simulation and gamification, among others), MonsoonSIM transforms experiential learning and provides a convenient infrastructure well-built for both academic and corporate training.
“All this is possible by the new cloud platform MonsoonSIM.” Adds Dr. Violeta Cvetksoka, “As a certified trainer of MonsoonSIM, I am firmly convinced that this approach for learning by linking gamification and working with live data is a way to teach students to think and to transfer the gained knowledge and skills in their companies or to their employers.”
With MonsoonSIM, a teacher can switch between gamification and simulation in real-time, transforming the teaching and learning of business concepts across a wide range of disciplines. Having digitized over 500 business concepts, teachers can become facilitators that configure a business scenario involving one or more of these following departments: Finance, Retail, Marketing, Warehouse Logistics, Forecasting, Wholesales, ECommerce, Production, MRP, Human Resources, Maintenance, and Service Management.
“The flow of real-time information across departments integrates ERP process into a single system providing a process of visibility, analytics and efficiency across every aspects of a business which makes the simulation and training very meaningful.” Explains Donny Siu, the Associated Director of the Entrepreneurship Center of HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).
While teachers and facilitators define and configure the “business world” where learners operate in, learners themselves can learn in an immersive, virtual, "business world" where they interact, transact and compete with robots, AI-based virtual teaching assistants, and other learners.
Additionally, MonsoonSIM provides data analytics support with live data access. With big data and data analytics as the pillars of the Industrial Revolution 4.0, most business courses are now geared to help students become data scientists. With MonsoonSIM, the path to do so is clear, easy and direct. In a MonsoonSIM game, students must make critical decisions during business transactions, among them market forecast, currency fluctuations, interest rates and more which is live-accessible. Students can use 3rd party data analytics tools (like PowerBI, Tableau, R, Cognos, Excel, etc.) to tap into the MonsoonSIM data in real-time and design their corporate dashboards, reports or find outliers.
“It also has the ability to provide the students with the performance data for them to analyze and use their analytic skills to determine appropriate business strategies. This helps provide the "missing link" in most analytic programs. I have been looking for a tool that helps demonstrate the integration of ERP systems, and MonsoonSIM provides this.” Comments Severin Grabski, PhD, Faculty Director of the MS Business Analytics, Broad College of Business, Michigan State University.
Over the years, MonsoonSIM has also built a community of eager learners and experienced facilitators. Active and growing through the club games, leagues and competitions, MonsoonSIM now has over 1,300 clubs registered online throughout the world, which compete with each other through the online club games, earn league standings and improve their ratings (the club ELO and personal ELO). The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. All club and personal scorecards, including the club ELO or personal ELOs can be published online as evidence of their hard work and achievement in their quest for business knowledge.
In relation to this, Dr. Scott Dell, CPA, DBA, Assistant professor of the School of Business, Francis Marion University, USA, also says, “The potential value to my students is immense. I have never seen a more complete or realistic simulation—even the ones that I participated in as a mentor in previous high school and college competitions. The integration of gamification with team efforts stimulates the kind of thinking and soft skills that I like to see and could make a difference in inspiring my students as they take the knowledge learned from multiple educational disciplines and apply it within the competition.”
Moreover, every year, MonsoonSIM conducts an international inter-varsity competition called the MERMC (MonsoonSIM Enterprise Resources Management Competition). This event, which started in 2015, has involved thousands of students from over 10 countries. With high levels of excitement, energy and passion, students from all discipline of higher learning institutions will compete in fun and exciting simulation games and gain further exposure towards the concept of Enterprise Resource Management (ERM).
“We are extremely happy with student engagement in the simulation and also the holistic understanding of accounting and business processes that students have gained. Students really enjoyed participating in the simulation and they report how much they have learnt from their participation.” Remarks Dr. Christine, Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Business and Law, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Accounting at Deakin University.
To put it simply, MonsoonSIM’s business simulation and gamification education platform offers a unique, experiential learning opportunity for students and transforms the way business concepts are taught in class. MonsoonSIM looks forward to supporting more students worldwide in a way where there’s more to learn, easier to learn!