New Reports for the assessment of learning

SIMBOUND has now officially crossed the 10 year old mark! For the better part of the last decade we have continued to remain a reliable partner to education establishments from across the world. Our work with implementing new technology and the research of new pedagogy continues making progress and the growing international community built around the learning methodology which we pioneered inspires us to continue to act in a responsible and sustainable way.

Thank you to all of you which have helped turn the SIMBOUND journey into an exciting one!

One significant improvement for the SIMBOUND product in Q1 of 2022 was the release of 2 new automatically generated reports that measure student decisions and student results data in order to provide instructors with fast and accurate insight on their courses. 

This new set of reports enables the professor to efficiently monitor the performance of all students enrolled in their course. They can then delve deeper into the data with a team-level results report, which provides insights into individual and team performance over time.

Later update: In Q3 2023 a new 'Presenter Mode' feature has been introduced which aims to provide a quick to assess snapshot of student activity across all the sections of the simulation. This report is provided in a slide by slide format and can easily be projected in class. It provide a quick to follow visual breakdown of the status for each student/team on a host of metrics (e.g. low page score, or low profit) by highlight also through a green/red symbol the decisions that would need to be improved. This can be launched from the main instructor dashboard in the button next to each course name.

As you can see in the above image, only one team - Rapid discounters- has passed the threshold for not having too many pages with Low Page Score indicated by the green symbol above its name. By clicking on the video symbol next to each dimension, a quick video tutorial will be brought up which shows how to fix every issue.

The interim report

The interim course report has the main role to signal red flags and present team decisions and results so that they can be addressed by the tutor with reasonable time left until the end of the course. It contains the interim term because this report becomes more useful to consult whilst in the middle of the learning activity so soon after a simulation has passed the very first stage or round, and it will continue to remain relevant up until the simulation is near completion. If the report is used too early then it does not have enough decisions and results data to produce meaningful analysis and likewise if the report is brought up too late in the course, it might be too late to let the students know what to address within their decisions in order to try to lead them towards meaningful learning.

Here are a few examples from a real course with explanations.

•  1 Team has no web pages: Purple  

This team can't progress in the simulation because it doesn't have any pages. Working on the other sections, Ads and Email will require setting up of web pages.

• 5 Teams have multiple pages of a score below 70: Green4You,EasySportPlanner,Sky Blue,Dark Green

A score below 70 on multiple pages indicates that most of these teams have utilized the automated page creation feature in Simbound, which sets up new pages with a few clicks. However, they have not reviewed the standard content, such as text and images, that are automatically inserted onto each page. Consequently, these pages have not been optimized and have likely not been reviewed by humans. The simulation engine will recognize and reward pages with higher scores with increased visits and even more favorable results, including sales and conversions.

• 2 Teams which have currently set a smaller value than their available budget for the current round: Purple,EasySportPlanner

Failing to set the advertising budget to its maximum amount in one round will result in missed opportunities for brand awareness, lead generation, and customer acquisition. The primary reason for this is that any remaining budget from one round will not be carried forward to subsequent rounds. For example, if a team sets the maximum budget of a campaign to 100 while having a disposable value of 1500, they are missing out on an opportunity to spend 1500-100= 1400. In a real-life company, the budget will remain available for future use if it is not spent in the simulation. Our pedagogical approach aims to encourage students to think about budget allocation in an iterative manner, rather than as a one-time decision. By reviewing all of their cost-producing advertising campaigns, students are encouraged to reach the largest possible audience and to understand the role of cost on the return on advertising spending, as well as in the seasonality of client behavior. Timing is essential when carrying out marketing operations.

• 2 Team(s) which spent less than 60% of their available budget last round: Purple,Sky Blue

It should be noted that some teams included in this report may not yet have initiated a campaign (teams meet the condition of spending less than 60% of their budget by default at the start of the simulation). However, for those that do have active campaigns, spending less than 60% of their budget is an important indicator that the campaign settings may not have been correctly implemented. There are a number of potential causes for this issue, including an insufficient number of keywords, an excess of low-volume keywords, an inadequate input of the minimum required amount into the Cost-Per-Click decision box, or a lack of budget allocation. Furthermore, there may be other issues that require attention. For instance, an incorrect ad format will not trigger ads. In some instances, the student may have failed to recognize that the campaign or specific elements of the campaign, such as ad groups, have been paused in previous rounds. This prevents the campaign from accumulating expenditure.

The Team-focused report

(this will work for individuals as well)

The team-focused report provides a more detailed analysis of the performance of each team or individual. It is designed to provide highly personalized feedback on each team’s learning journey and to suggest improvements to their decisions and results. The team-focused report lists results and compares them to those of other teams or individuals in the course. This enables the tutor to provide more in-depth guidance and to assess each team or individual's relative position. Here is just one example of the more than 14 distinct report items currently available with the team report:

Team Blue has an average page score of 59.
The average score of a page in the course is: 88.

The objective of this new series of reporting features is to reduce the time and effort required by tutors in their interpretation of simulation results, while also reducing the possibility of human error when determining which individuals or teams the instructor should focus on first and provide support to. The management of courses with a large number of students is now significantly simplified thanks to these reports, which will be enhanced based on the future feedback coming within user community.

Peering into the future.

Some challenges lie ahead: how can we at SIMBOUND best manage a product that caters to different types of courses, and also different geographical markets while trying to keep working on our initial promise of having a simple and efficient simulation experience that simply works time after time.  
 

Some big questions yet to answer are how we can make use of new trends and technologies entering the educational space such as automatization and AI without compromising the tutor-student relationship and to avoid the undermining of the role that dialogue and social interaction have in learning. The content and complexity of the learning activity should and will eventually be adapted to each student’s skills and we trust that in this process the tutor will play an ever increasing role in determining the types of learning systems their school will choose to employ.
 

Explaining an evolving learning product to the many professors and students from around the world, some of which do not yet hold the fundamental skills or the resources needed to make full use of our services will probably become a bigger challenge in the years to come. We have a very interesting journey in front of us in which all of the parties who are involved in the carrying out of education are invited to express their needs and ideas so that we can together progress in the same excellent manner as up until now. Here is to the next 10 years and to the same carefully crafted quality of instruction service which has inspired educators the world over.