Course Setup Guide: From Creation to Student Enrollment

1. Get an instructor account

It all starts with an Instructor Account. This gives you access to the simulation management and reporting tools — course creation, configuring rounds, enrolling participants, reading results and awarding grades.

2. Understand Licensing & Credits

Before you build a course, it helps to understand how Simbound is paid for, because you will choose a licensing method while creating the course. Each participant needs an individual user license tied to their account to access the simulation.

The licensing methods

How user licenses work

• Each license is valid for one simulation run and one participant.
• Licenses are purchased in bulk by the school/instructor, or individually by participants at enrollment.
• Participants can keep enrolling even if the license balance of your account goes negative — you then confirm payment for the additional licenses used.
• Participants cannot see your license balance or purchase prices.

Platform credits (Cost per Use)

Non-academic courses with credit-based licensing enabled will track in-simulation actions, deducting credits for each new decision as follows:

• 1 credit per decision (e.g. set up a new website page).
• 3 credits to submit decisions for a round.

3. Plan your course

Simbound simulations are intensive learning experiences. A little planning before you build the course pays off in a smoother first week. Four things are worth deciding up front.

3.1 Participant preparation

Give participants time to orient themselves before Round 1.

Share materials several days before Round 1, and consider scheduling an intro meeting (online or in person) to demo the simulation. Add practice rounds so participants can work through tutorials and try out the simulation mechanics. Registration can take place before or during Round 1.

3.2 Expected participant numbers & teams

If using teams, predefine the number of teams, and optionally assign individuals to teams before distributing enrollment links.

3.3 Simulation Calendar

Choose course duration, the interval between rounds, and the total number of rounds. Factor in participant skill level, team vs. individual learning requirements, total available time for each Round, and whether you'll include practice rounds.

4.4 Large Enrollments

If you expect close to or more than 100 participants, consider inviting a co-instructor to help with management and communication, and check that you have enough licenses before sharing enrollment links.

4. Create the course (6-step workflow)

A Simbound course is a simulation instance that you configure and manage. Courses use ready-made scenarios containing all the simulation data where the system automatically tracks each participant's engagement and results. Each course is identified by a unique 5-character alphanumeric code that is part of the enrollment link.

New Course at a glance

• Name — your title for the course (visible to participants).
• Scenario — the standard or your own parameters the simulation will run on.
• Licensing — School-paid, Participant-paid
• Calendar — Round structure, availability of simulation sections and deadlines.
• Markets — e.g. the USA, the UK, France etc.
• Unique course code — the 5-character enrollment identifier.

The course builder walks you through these following six steps:

Course builder — the six-step setup wizard guides you through the setup, licensing, template, scheduling, and activities.

5. Course Templates

At Step 3 of course creation you can choose a template that pre-fills the course structure. You can fine-tune these details afterwards in the next step.

6. Rounds & simulation control

Progressing through rounds defines the pace of the simulation. Each round is one period in which participant teams input their marketing decisions and submit them to close off that round. You can control how and when each round opens and closes from the Calendar module. From there you can add, remove, restart, or reschedule rounds, and enable or disable access to individual simulation sections. You can add or disable markets or audience segments for the Social Media Simulation at any time.

6.1 Launch dates and deadlines

• Round launch dates open decision-making — participants can't act on a round until its launch date is reached. Participants can continue to browse the simulation up until the launch date.
• Shared Progress courses will have calculated results for the entire course at predetermined times.
• Independent Progress courses allow participants to move across rounds with results being issued on demand, rather than at a shared deadline.

6.2 Practice Rounds

Practice rounds let participants try the interface and decision making before scores count. For beginner cohorts, 1–2 practice rounds are recommended.

6.3 Restart a Round

Restarting lets participants re-enter the previously completed round to change their decisions in the case they launched a round by accident or if they want to make changes to their previously submitted decisions. Participants can restart rounds individually only within Independent Progress courses if the Instructor allows them to do so. In shared progress courses, only instructors can restart rounds, and this applies to the entire class.

• Assets — Websites, SEA, SMM, Affiliate Campaigns, Communities — are Preserved on Restart.
• Emails can optionally be Deleted when a round is restarted and they will need to be recreated before submitting the round again.

6.4 Preview a Round (Check-up)

Preview mode (also called Check-up) gives limited access to predictive results during an active round, so participants can assess their performance before submitting the round. Enable or disable this option during course creation or from Course Settings.

7. Teams

Simbound enables team-based activities, with each team submitting one set of decisions per round. You can manually assign teams or allow students to form their own.

Option A — Create teams before students enroll

Option B — Auto-assign teams after enrollment

8. Enroll participants

After creating a course, participants join using the course enrollment URL, which contains the unique 5-character course code. Each link encodes the course code and, optionally, a team assignment.

Three ways to share the enrollment link

On the Participants tab, each team has its own unique link — share each one only with the participants who belong to that team. Once participants are enrolled, you can start the simulation immediately.

Settings Page — course enrollment link and 5-character code are displayed. Copy the full URL for the easiest participant experience.

9. Manage participants

From the Participants tab you can view and manage everyone enrolled in the course, see their teams, and act on individual accounts.

Test accounts

Each course can have three optional test accounts, auto-enrolled for testing and for demonstrating the simulation in front of the class. Use them to walk through the participant experience before your cohort arrives.

Participant-level actions

Click on the Settings symbol next to a participant's name to access the following actions:

You can send messages to individual participants or entire teams, filtering by active or dormant status, display participant decision counts, and reassign accounts between teams or courses as needed.

10. Course Settings

Open the course settings by clicking the course name on your instructor dashboard. Most configuration can be adjusted here after the course has started. Settings you can change include:

• Course name and currency
• Market selection
• Preview Results (Check-up) toggle
• Licensing method selection
• Referral, Direct, and Email traffic values, and product-level rules for conversions
• Social Media Simulation configuration (audiences, etc.)
• Enable / Disable Search Advertising (SEA) bonuses
• Automatic notifications to inactive participants
• Show or Hide overall participant rankings
• Block participants from inputting new decisions
• Block new enrollments to the course
• Disable ESG content within the simulation
• Disable Step-by-Step tutorials.
• Enable AI text check and improvement suggestions
• Invite co-instructors to help manage the course
• Add course logo that is shown to Participants on the Enrollment Page

11. Engagement Features: Objectives, Bonuses & Tests

Every course includes optional activities to boost interactivity and learning outcomes. None of them are mandatory and will not prevent a participant's progression within the simulation.

Objectives

Set basic tasks for each round to guide participants and track engagement. Objectives can be edited or removed, but it's best to keep them stable once the course has begun.

Bonuses

Provide extra search advertising budget for specific decisions or strong performance to encourage strategic behaviour and competition. Enable or disable bonuses anytime via Course Settings. You can also query the chatbot for the bonus condition of each round.

Tests

Tests measure understanding of simulation concepts and track learning progress. They consist of multiple-choice questions with four options, where one (or more) are correct. Crucially, questions are dynamically generated from each participant's own simulation data, which prevents answer sharing. Tests may assess:

• Website or campaign performance
• Product sales
• Marketing decision outcomes

12. Simulation Results

The Results & reporting module displays participant performance across every simulation section — Website, Search Engine Advertising (SEA), Email, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Community, and Affiliate — and supports ranking participants or teams across one or multiple rounds and across different courses.

What's measured

Engagement metrics & the "Decisions" measure

Simbound captures participant engagement — SEA bonus completion, Test results, End-of-round comments, Learning-journal entries, and the general Simbound Quiz. The main engagement metric is Decisions: the number of times a participant creates, updates, or deletes entries in their simulation (for example, a new ad campaign, a keyword edit, or an ad variation).

Reports you can export

You can view and download comprehensive spreadsheet reports for deeper analysis, including a configurable Team Report covering team and individual performance, ranking trends, changes from the previous round, improvement insights, SEA decisions and results, and general participant statistics. You can also share files and learning materials with participants through the Resources module (JPEG, PNG, GIF, PDF, MS Word, and MS PowerPoint).

13. Editing a course after launch

Simbound is flexible: you can modify most settings even once the course has started. A few core choices, however, are locked once the course is created.

14. Cloning & archiving

Cloning a course

Cloning duplicates an existing course configuration so you can reuse it across multiple runs or units with consistent setup. The system creates an exact copy of the selected course, including:

• Simulation scenario and currency
• Simulation section availability and round of release
• Licensing method
• Number of teams
• Practice round settings, plus preview and restart options
• Objectives and test questions

Archiving a course

Archiving moves inactive or completed courses out of your main dashboard into the Archive section, keeping your workspace uncluttered.

15. Co-instructors & permissions

Co-instructors share the same management and reporting access to a course. Adding one is especially useful for large cohorts, or when you're sharing management with a colleague or teaching assistant.

16. Course Setup Checklist

Before your course goes live, run through this checklist to make sure everything is in place.

Frequently asked questions

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