When you're teaching with a business simulation, struggling companies are often run by the students who are learning the most. That's why healthy financials shouldn't be the only way to evaluate your students.
But how can you measure effort when grading?
Watch Tyler O'Neill, Product Manager at Capsim, showcase how you can use the Custom Report Builder to gather the data you need to do just that.
"Hello, everyone. Strong profits and healthy financials aren't the only way to measure student performance in our simulations. Participants who put effort to understand the concepts and experiment with strategy get the most out of the experience, even if their company struggles. But how can you measure effort when grading? The Custom Report Builder, available in Capsum Core, Capsum Ops, Capsum Global, and Capsum 2.0, can generate metrics that will help you evaluate participation and engagement. In this video, I am going to show you multiple ways you can do that.
You can access the Custom Report Builder from the left-hand navigation bar on your main dashboard. The first option of monitoring your student engagement is to generate a report with the last date logged in and the number of logins metrics. This will help you gauge how often your students are accessing the simulation, including a timestamp for the last time they've logged in. These are useful metrics to track early on in your course to see if your students are familiarizing themselves with the simulation. If a student has zero logins for the first few weeks of the course, that would be considered a red flag. This would be a good opportunity to engage with the student regarding their lack of participation. You can always download these reports, then generate the same report for a follow-up in later weeks. This will allow you to see if their logins have improved.
The next data point that you can utilize for grading student participation is training progress. Instructors typically require their students to complete their simulation training prior to the practice and competition rounds. So, a custom report that displays the time and date when a student completed each training section can be beneficial to tracking their engagement. If you set a training deadline, you can review the timestamps for completion. If students miss the deadline, participation grades may be impacted.
In a foot race setting where students run their companies individually instead of in teams, instructors can rely on the "decisions uploaded" option to monitor their student progress in the simulation. It is a great reference point for large foot race courses because it allows you to see who has saved and uploaded decisions on a round-by-round basis. If students are not uploading decisions, then they are not participating.
Finally, for team settings, we recommend that instructors utilize the free peer evaluation tool as part of the simulation experience. These evaluations can be scheduled through the peer evaluation tab on your left-hand navigation bar, and you can access the results directly in the Custom Report Builder. Peer evaluations can provide another indicator of who is participating and who might be loafing in a team setting. I recommend downloading the Excel for a better view of the full comments. Grading will vary depending on preference, but scores and comments from their teammates will be provided for each student. This can help with identifying and investigating conflicts on teams with participation issues.
So, there you have it. Grading participation and effort can be a challenge, but with the Custom Report Builder, you will have access to a variety of relevant metrics in a clean, downloadable report. Monitoring and analyzing this information will help you identify who is and who is not active within your course. We hope this demonstration provided some insights into how you can evaluate student engagement throughout the simulation. If you have any questions regarding the Custom Report Builder or grading participation in general, then please feel free to reach out to our support team at support@capsum.com. We appreciate you tuning in and look forward to your feedback."