Featured Professor: Larry Chasteen

Imagine you must deliver a semester long MBA course – in one week. How would you rework your curriculum? As a strategy professor and Director of the Online MBA program at University of Texas at Dallas, Larry Chasteen, Ph.D. has faced this problem. Professor Chasteen found his solution in Capsim’s Foundation business simulation.

Before his teaching days, Dr. Chasteen was a Program Manager at Texas Instruments and Raytheon, and his current teaching methods reflect his focus on applied learning. “I like to make my courses as practical as possible,” he said. “That is one of the main reasons for using the simulation.”

Dr. Chasteen isn’t just teaching students in Texas, however, he also teaches an MBA strategy course each summer at the ESC Lille University campus in Paris where he faces a different set of challenges. Would his French students also respond to Capsim? As both schools are AACSB accredited, they have comparable learning goals, but he was concerned his French students wouldn’t be able to handle the semester-long workload in just one week.

As the Foundation business simulation was one of the most popular parts of his UTD courses, Dr. Chasteen took the opportunity to carry the simulation over to France – and found great success. “Team work and team competition keeps the course very interesting for all the students,” he said. “The French students are very competent and have given some of the best end-of-game evaluations that I have ever had.”

Chasteen even went so far to say, “I guess when you have a very realistic simulation, it is translatable to any place in the world!”

Business, it seems, is a universal language.

If you’d like to share your story on how Capsim’s business simulations have helped your class, contact us at welcome@capsim.com.