Successfully using the marketing simulation with great support from Hubro

It’s important to know why educators choose Hubro when looking for business simulations. As this testimonial shows it’s not just the simulations. It’s the service and relationship that Hubro strives to provide. Dr. Heather Davis shares her experiences with Hubro so far and why she chose the Hubro Marketing simulation for her post-graduate students and their online course.

 

Marketing simulations and the evolution of online learning

We recently hit a geographical milestone as we started working with our first client in Australia! 

Marcus Oldham is a leading agriculture, agribusiness and equine college. Director of Postgraduate Studies, and Director of Teaching and Learning Governance Dr. Heather Davis has incorporated the Hubro Marketing Simulation in the post-graduate unit Agribusiness Marketing. It was great to see that Hubro Marketing Simulations fits well into her online course and provides a valuable tool to both the educator and students.

Heather has a wealth of experience with over 20 years of being involved in online teaching. She explains how she has seen firsthand the evolution of the solutions that are provided for online students.

Back in the early days, let’s call this Web 1.0 (and I suspect more recently when lots of face-to-face classes rapidly moved to remote learning due to Covid-19) these materials mostly replicated what was being taught in the classroom—copies  of written materials that would have been handed out in class. 

Over time more interactivity has been built into the web based curriculum, using Web 2.0 capabilities with added layers of social interaction, to provide lots of options for more interesting ways to stimulate teaching and learning on the web.

 

Dr. Heather Davis, Marcus Oldham 

 

How business simulations fit into online learning

Heather believes that this has created the perfect space for simulations.

Within this landscape is a place for online simulations--well designed simulations matching the required learning outcomes of units are really useful tools for online teaching and learning.

Of course during COVID there was a huge increase in online learning. With this comes the issue of engagement. A lot of digital solutions have come into the picture to try and tackle this. By combining solutions Heather has found what works for her students.

Opportunities for engagement are now abundant for online teaching and learning.

In the early days engagement opportunities were mainly asynchronous with tools like discussion boards, etc.  More recently, and really making moves due to Covid-19 remote learning settings are webinars—Zoom is now both a noun and a verb!  

Webinars provide synchronous opportunities for peer-to-peer learning as well as real-time interactions between lecturers and students.

By using Hubro Marketing in conjunction with Zoom students can work together in real time. The decisions and tasks being worked on by different members of the team are displayed in everyone's user. 

 

How the marketing simulation encourages engagement

Marketing as a topic requires engagement in order to get a true understanding. Giving opportunities for a practical application not only increases engagement but also allows students to get that deeper understanding.

This is exactly what the marketing simulation provided for this online course. Not only did our marketing simulation encourage engagement but also cover the fundamentals of marketing.  

While simulations do not provide the real-time engagement that a webinar might, they are an engaging way for our students to explore key principles of say marketing (Hubro) or leadership (Fligby).

We believe that simulations provide added value to the student experience and are an engaging way to learn these foundational understandings in concert with textbooks and other reading materials.

 

 

How and why Heather uses the Hubro Marketing simulation

It’s always great to work with educators who share the same passion we do for engaging and quality educational experiences. Heather is one of those educators.  

We asked Heather why she chose Hubro.

First and foremost we are keen to develop relationships with our educational tech providers, and Hubro are committed to their relationships too.  

There are many simulation providers out there, and what sets Hubro apart from other simulations we tested for our marketing unit, was the ability for our marketing lecturer and myself to apply our own layer of information for our students.  We are able to make clear connections between the context for the marketing simulation—jet packs in the future—and our courses in agribusiness.

We know the importance of great relationships. It was great to hear this was a reason Heather chose Hubro. Recognizing it as a space for educators to share ideas and provide their students with the best experience possible.

 

Using Hubro business simulations as an assessment tool

Assessment is a large part of using the Hubro Marketing Simulation at Marcus Oldham. Professors take advantage of the flexibility the Hubro simulation offers in this area. This was recognized by the professors at Marcus Oldham and is something that makes Hubro stand out for them.

The ability to integrate our own assessments within Hubro’s platform has been very beneficial for us and we have used some of Hubro’s pre-prepared assessments too.  Another benefit of belonging to a community of scholars and ed tech developers is the sharing of materials freely within the community to use as they are or tweak for our own purposes.

Many of Hubro’s users use the business or marketing simulations for assessment purposes. Often it makes up a large part of the assessment for one unit or course. This is the case on the course at Marcus Oldham too. 

Currently we are using the marketing simulation, and the simulation with its embedded assessments is worth 50% of the overall assessment for our postgraduate unit ‘Agribusiness marketing’, a compulsory unit in our Graduate Certificate of Agribusiness.

Using an engaging learning tool as a way to assess students will only bring beneficial results. In an online learning environment it is even more important to make the most of digital solutions for assessment. If students are engaged within the simulation, creating assessments within it makes sense.

 

Why Heather recommends Hubro simulations

It was great to listen to Heather’s experience so far with Hubro marketing. To hear that the students are engaged and learning from the business simulations is all we could want.

I have only one cohort so far to comment on, but even from the very first use of this simulation there were clear signs of engagement and enjoyment with the process and the content.  Some also really liked the competitive nature of the simulation and that kept some really engaged too.

The first cohort that has used Hubro Marketing simulation gave Heather some very positive feedback which she kindly passed onto us.

One of our students from the first cohort, a lawyer, mentioned to me in a telephone call that it "was the most fun she had doing an assessment—EVER!"

So that’s another pin on our virtual map! We couldn’t be happier to be working with Marcus Oldham, and hope that both Heather and her students continue to learn from and enjoy Hubro business simulations!