Simulations, Distance Learning, and Social Networking will enable the One Thousand Dollar MBA

China and India and so many other countries are fully engaging the global economy from both the supply and demand side. As a result, innovative companies are breaking price barriers that were once thought impermeable.

We have already seen the sub-1000 dollar computer. Then the sub-500. And now the sub-200.

We have seen sub-4000 dollar cars, thought impossible by Detroit. While they are not perfect by the glossy standards of American companies, these vehicles fit a critical demand. One can also reasonably expect the cars' manufacturers to become increasingly powerful on the world stage. Meanwhile the cost in emerging markets of so many other services, such as cell phones minutes, are tiny fractions of their US counterpart. Every year brings more breakings of price floors - the equivalent of beating the four minute mile - in market segment after market segment.

There is one race that may be under the radar of most, but has huge implications. That is the global race to the sub-1000 dollar MBA.

Why the 1K MBA?

The need for a low cost MBA is both obvious and less so. In the obvious camp, there are highly populous nations that need to put vast numbers of workers through MBA programs to become their emerging business leaders. These are people who would be fighting for the privilege of getting an 80 thousand dollar MBA if they were in the United States or Europe.

But there are less obvious markets as well. In all countries including the United States, in most corporations, there are entire swaths of employees, from directors to vice presidents and higher, who are without formal skills in everything from financial management to project management to leadership. This “winging-it” middle management – who often resemble MBA’s in everything but skills - represent tremendous penalties to shareholder value. The lowering of MBA’s costs will greatly increase their adoption by these employees who desperately need the skills.

New Design Principles

Creating the 1K MBA will require some significant re-engineering. New principles will have to frame the design.

Before we go any further, we can anticipate the predictable response from the existing MBA vendors, including institutions and professors. They will say that it is impossible to create equivalent value proposition at this new price point. They will say that attempts are even fundamentally dangerous, as they will necessarily create cheap imitations and degree inflation.

Given that, here are some of the necessary principles for the new MBA:

• The mission of the 1K MBA programs must remain the same as existing MBA’s. The quality has to be very high – in selective places better than current top rated programs, including Harvard, Insead, or Wharton.
• Collectively, the 1K MBA programs will have more than ten times the number of graduates than all of the current MBA programs combined. The emphasis will be on high volume, not elitism. (This puts greater pressure on the role of quality content and rigorous certification.)
• The human component of delivery has to be greatly minimized. Rather than offloading the marquee professor to the teaching assistant as is currently the practice, the programs will require the better capturing of deep content from the marquee professor in the technology itself wherever possible.
• The programs will leverage distance learning technology and methodology
• The programs will leverage simulation technology and methodology
• The programs will leverage social networking technology and methodology

Obviously, as stated in the above principles, there will be a reliance on technology that will necessarily preclude some participation in the developing world where technology is scarce. But the continued rapid spread of technology, as well as the necessary value provided by the technology, makes this a necessary trade-off today that will increasingly be mitigated in the long run.

Technology Part 1: Distance Learning

One of the three core technologies is around distance learning. This is necessary to eliminate the need for travel, room and board - all major current costs. This also increases starting and ending time flexibility. Finally, it allows some students to get MBA’s while also holding jobs and being productive in their family and community.

There has been much progress in the areas of distance learning over the past five to ten years. Early mistakes have been made, and best practices are now established.

Unfortunately, most distance universities currently have to make a significant choice between the following two insufficient models:

• Low cost/flat content. Some distance universities have flat content, but delivered at a relatively attractive price point. The universities, including many that define the distance learning marketplace, have seen the value of their master’s programs decline.
• High cost/rich content. Some distance universities, such as Full Sail University’s Masters of Educational Media Design & Technology, have rich programs with high student engagement and satisfaction, but not delivered at a significantly lower cost than face to face. This is in part because of the very involved role of the instructors.

Technology Part 2: Social Networking

The second of the three core technologies is social networking. This has currently been increasingly and successfully integrated into leading distance learning programs, including through using Facebook and YouTube, and through new tools integrated into course management systems such as Moodle.

The experience of working through challenging content with a set of peers over time must be maintained and even improved. "Classes" are critical, and maybe even better assembled than through chance today. Meanwhile, textbooks will be over time replaced by open-source online material.

Technology Part 3: Simulations and Serious Games

The third critical piece of technology is simulations and serious games (collectively called sims). It is not an overstatement to say that sims are necessary for any 1K MBA due to their combination of engagement, effectiveness and scalability.

This is because, unlike the talking-head videos and interactive workbooks of first generation eLearning, sims are super-media. They:

• Cover twice as much content in half as much time (4X improvement), due to their richness and interactivity.
• Develop knowledge that decays at one-fifth to one-tenth the rate of directive learning (5 to 10X improvement). Sims develop passion and commitment through kinesthetic experiences.
• Aggregated over time, cost one tenth (or less) per student per hour (10X improvement) for delivering content. This is because many sims, as many computer games today, are stand-alone, with instruction built in. Sims can therefore hugely reduce the amount of rote work done, allowing fewer professors to add greater value to more students.

Sims also can enable the inclusion of content that just couldn’t be covered using traditional methodology, typically in the areas of “learning to do” rather than just “learning to know.” This is done in part through careful level design, including interactive environments and challenges. This new approach is critical, as a current sharp criticisms of MBA programs is that students don't graduate with skills--they only have learning and have to figure out how to apply it, to the detriment of many companies who hire them early in their careers.

From a capitalization perspective, the cost of creating a critical mass of sims is relevant but not insurmountable. From scratch, sims cost about 100K per finished hour. This will require investment up-front in sim based content that pays off over five to seven years, but usable over an infinitely broad marketplace.

Need for Lead Designers

The technology already exist. What is needed, and is currently in short supply, are lead designers – people who have actually created large numbers of proven sims, not the academics who currently speculate about them. This is an art and science. But the grammar of this new discipline is covered in

The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games - How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created In the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google.

Current MBA Programs will be endangered

The propagation of the 1K MBA will challenge the existing models. It is conceivable that the United States will loose the bottom half of their MBA programs every five to ten years moving forward indefinitely and asymptotically. Harvard and Wharton are safe, but the overall market will shrink.

Impact and Conclusion

The 1K MBA will have multiple positive impacts. First, it will improve the standard of living of millions. It will increase the productivity of people, and at the same time curb inflation driven by higher people costs during booms. Further, it will provide a new role model for all education. It will soon impact other disciplines, and schools in general.

And the cascade effect brought about by successful low-cost, sim driven alternatives to traditional higher ed, while painful to schools in the short run, could have the long-term effect of bringing the postindustrial revolution to education.

Flow States in Sim Design: When to use it, and when to avoid it

The optimal learning state is that of being in “flow.” The term, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [Csikszentmihalyi, M (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimum experience. New York: Harper Perennial.], refers to a mental state of immersion and clarity. This is analogous to when athletes refer to themselves as “being in the zone;” and the term has made its way into a number of fields including video game research. Writers and computer game players alike discuss situations where they lose track of time for hours at a time.

- Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds (Aldrich, 2009)

The model of flow suggests that interactive experiences are at their best when they are always appropriately challenging users - getting easier if a person is struggling and harder if they are excelling. Having said that, for any sim designer, flow needs to be implemented carefully.

Ensuring Flow can be Counter-Intuitive Within a Level

For example, when one is designing a level of a resource planning sim (such as using a Tycoon or Real Time Strategy genre, such as this financial acument for non-financial people sim), the implications can be counter-intuitive. An obvious implementation of flow is: the more a person is struggling, the more resources (such as money) should be made available for them to spend.

(In contrast, the default assumption of a player or designer is the opposite - that more resources flow to those who are successful.) To make this flow version work, a designer may then have to then de-aggregate "access to resources" and "success." For example, if you are managing the production of the farm, you can "do best" by spending the least, in order to get promoted.

Strong "Flow" Implementations can Reward the Wrong Behavior

The problem here is the getting additional resources to spend is a more intrinsic reward structure than the extrinsic motivation of a promotion. Players like spending, and are likely to delibrately do worse in order to get more resources more quickly.

(Similarly, racing games often use the within-level flow technique of "rubber-banding," where opponents that are too far ahead of the player are slowed down, and opponents that are too far behind the player are pulled forward.)

Using Levels as the Structure that Ensures Flow

So using strong flow techniques may be confusing and counter-prodictive within a level. Having said that, it is essential between levels. In fact, as long as there has been games, level design has always been a default framework for enabling flow. The first level is easy. The second level is a bit harder, and so on. The player only gets to a harder level by demonstrating competency in an earlier level.

However, just incrementally more difficult level designs alone does not ensure flow - a series of easy early levels can bore an expert, even if they pass them the first time around. Rather, the inclusion of other flow principles leads to greater success, and even some very simple, yet still hopefully interesting, metrics:

The better the player does, the faster they can get thought a level: One way to measure "flow" in sim design is to measure to what level a player can get in a given amount of time (say, ten minutes). In a well designed sim, a newbie might only get to level 2 in ten minutes. Meanwhile, an expert (such as that same newbie after more experience), might get to level 7 in ten minutes.

The better the player does, the more than can save up critical resources in a level: One can use variations of this when levels absolutely have to be fixed in length. One can instead ask, how many resources (money, energy, extra time) can one accumulate by level X? Here, in a well designed sim, by level 5, an expert should have accumulated ten times the amount of critical resources than a newbie.

Conclusion

Artificially ensuring flow, like the specific case of "rubber-banding" in racing games, can be an exploitable cheat that undermines the experience, including game-play and simulation model. So flow must align with fidelity, such as in level design, and not be an excuse to undermine it.

Having said that, flow can be measured through easy metrics that impact sim design, rather than just more complicated physiological techniques. One example is, "how far can a player get in ten minutes based on their experience."

There is a new pedagogy and instructional methodology that is being uncovered by and for sim design. This is just one glimpse into a whole new philosophy of design.

How The MESH will Change Education

Formal education institutions exist in their current form only because tests and other forms of assessment are so poor. If there was a perfect assessment system, someone could just prove what they know, regardless of how they gained the knowledge. This would render the concepts of four year college and graduate school with their archaic diplomas and transcripts instantly obsolete.

Any theoretically perfect assessment system must be reliable, accurate, and trusted (at least as much as current school systems). As well, it should by adaptive and current. This has caused problems in the past.

But these could be resolved. Imagine the emergence of The MESH.

Enter The MESH

The MESH would be structured similarly to a massively multi-player online role playing game such as World of Warcraft. But rather than killing dragons or aliens, teams would fluidly form to bid on and, if selected, attempt to solve real-world problems. Assuming they were successful, they would get a) points towards a "degree," and b) an increasingly detailed assessment of natural strengths (such as leadership or project management), industry preferences, and weaknesses to be worked on.

How The MESH would work

An organization would submit a real-world problem or challenge to The MESH, including time frame, resources made available, and maximum cash value willing to be paid by the organization for having the problem solved.

Teams would form and compete for the right to work on the challenge. The organization would then pick three teams, using such metrics as past success, final bid cost, and creativity of response. The three selected teams would work on the problem over the course of the time frame independently, and each submit their solution.

The organization would then choose one of the teams, take their solution, and pay for it. The funds would be split between the team (and each of the team members), and The MESH. More importantly, the team would also get assessment credit (that typically mapped directly to the cash paid out by the organization).

The organization would have the option of taking none of the responses, and paying nothing. But this would result in a less good rating of the organization, which may impact the quality of talent the organization could have bid on future projects.

Some Advantages of The MESH

Here are some the advantages of The MESH.

• Assessments are "real" and dynamic. They are always current and adaptive.
• The MESH rewards not just "Learning to Know" but also "Learning to Be" and "Learning to Do."
• The MESH is self-funding.
• There is a seamless transition from assessment to real work.
• There is not an "all or nothing" cram mentality of current tests. Some people might get "a degree" by working full time for six months, others may earn their points over years or decades.
• People currently in the workforce could seamlessly switch careers, even industries.
• Institutions and other service providers would pop up or evolve to help people learn critical skills they need to be successful in The MESH.
• People would get comfortable with certain other people. Trust and competence would be rewarded.
• The MESH would both borrow interface ideas from current games and sims.

There would be full time staff of stewards and curators. They might organize projects to fit into each degree. They could even create (or reuse classic) mini-practice challenges, worth nothing, but good for starting.

There would also be a significant role for philanthropy or other voluntarism. For example, many successful business people would donate their time to be mentors for projects or individuals as well, with some having bias to non-profit or specialized projects. Some mentors might insist that perspective mentees accomplish a certain level before even talking to them.

Conclusion

The future of assessment, and all of education, is The MESH. Social networking sites and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) have made the case. Now the next challenge is to harness this collective power towards real goals, not just more media.

Antecedent reading:

Why Use Sims in Ten Words

I was recently asked to summarize the value proposition of serious games and simulations in as few word as possible. Here was my answer.

• Conviction and competence through engagement; practice; emotion; and richer content.

The Next Step for Simulations and Serious Games: Multi-Genre Authoring Tools and a Vibrant Marketplace

Using Sims beyond the Highest priority, Mission critical Content

Simulations and Serious Games have proven their value for corporate, academic, government, and military organizations in terms of both appeal and effectiveness for developing new abilities in their users. Unlike traditional eLearning and classroom instruction: they enable students and other users to learn to do something new; and they develop conviction rather than awareness (essential for compliance training). Simulations and Serious Games (referred collectively as “sims) are also optimized for both younger and global learners.

But the process to create them today is too long and too expensive for most organizations to use them beyond the 5% to 10% of their high value/mission critical and external facing courses today. Further, the marketplace for selling and otherwise sharing them is too fragmented to provide reliable returns to attract many content creators. This has resulted in an identified, but unfulfilled need.

Authoring Tools and Marketplace

What is now needed are powerful, flexible, and accessible simulation creation tools as well as a viable, persistent simulation repository and marketplace.

By meeting this need, corporations will be able to develop, share, and acquire more effective programs more quickly than previously possible. This will meet a pent up and stated desire for more engaging and educational simulations in larger organizations. Meanwhile schools will be able to create richer and more effective programs, as well as gave students themselves toolkits to create richer content.

This could be accomplished through an online site that has many of the attributes of existing successful businesses. In the areas of authoring tools, models include Google Docs; in the areas of media-centric social networking sites, models include Flickr; in the area of marketplace models included iTunes.

This service is possible now due to advances in web technology, new business norms around micro-purchases (for example, people are used to buying 99 cent songs or 9.99 books on iTunes) evolution of many successful simulation projects in large enterprises, expectations of new employees who grew up with computer games, and a richer understanding of what makes a successful educational simulation.

There should be a development platform, social networking site, and marketplace for educational simulations and serious games. This will enable the delivery of the following features and functionality to its user base:

• A suite of web based authoring tools for creating sims, including some that are freely and open available, and some that are have advanced features available at a cost.
• A web based repository of sims, with rankings, including some that are freely and openly available, some that are only available to certain groups, and some that are available at a cost.
• Content creation and systems integration services.

Revenues could then be derived from four sources: a) subscription fees, b) advertising for free services c) marketplace transaction revenues, and d) consulting fees including content creation and system integration.

Use Cases

What follows is a list of possible, typical use cases using platform and services. While a variety of examples are given, all use the same core functionality.

Corporate user value speed, collaboration, and ease

A corporate instructional designer has one week to put together a new simulation around a competitive product. She goes to the site, finds a virtual product template, and using photographs and screen art, and creates virtual representation of the competitive product in less than one day. She then circulates this simulation to internal experts for comments. Finally she puts annotations and a course structure around the content and clicks to push it out to every relevant salesperson. The corporate LMS then pushes the new course out, in tracks usage of it.

Independent subject matter experts can create high value, multi-purpose content in a predictable market place

An independent financial subject matter expert creates a simulation-based course on financial acumen for non-financial personnel. He creates two generic versions. The first version is a light version available for free to anyone. The second version is much longer and more detailed and is available for $50.00 per person. This second version can be clicked for inclusion into a corporate curriculum, and has the option of using corporate colors, fonts, and logos. Finally, he is available to any corporation to make a custom version of the same course for which he charges a per hour fee, plus licensing.

Military user can create quick and highly interactive content that drives behavior change

The Center for Army Leadership discovers a new way to engage local militia. It quickly (6 weeks, rather that one year) develops a simulation based role play and pushes it out to soldiers in the field.

Research Organization produces sim to augment traditional report

A research organization, such as Accenture or Gartner, produces engaging, interactive sims to augment research reports. For example, Gatner may produce a dynamic pricing model showing acceptance of different products by different groups with different feature sets, all in animated format where customers could “play around” with different configurations. Or Accenture may not just explain a new marketplace reality in a report, but also provide a game that all employees of the sponsor organization could play to get a feel for the implications of these new realities.

Corporate user can build richer content effectively

A corporate instructional designer has to create a new employee orientation program. He looks through the libraries of existing content. Not finding anything he likes, he finds four different simulation genre frameworks, including an adventure game, a branching story, and a virtual product, and creates a comprehensive, but highly engaging program for all new employees.

Corporate user can adopt and customize best of breed third party content

A corporate training person creates a curriculum for high potential employees. She finds some free content that has been highly rated by the community, and creates a mirror copy of the content to ensure that it won't change. She then asked some of her own instructional designers to create a bit more additional content. Finally, she hires a trusted vendor to create a few more pieces of highly engaging content.

Schools can ask students to author richer content using free tools

The first grade teacher wants to create a new branching story for her students. She first goes online to the portal and looks for other examples. She find something as close enough, and is happy to see it is in the public domain category. She takes it, modifies it a little bit, and gives it to her students. She then re-uploads the improved version back into the public domain category.

Vacationers creates an interactive model of the resort at which they stayed

A couple returns from their vacation with dozens of pictures. They create an interactive map that shows off the hotel and golf course where they stayed.

Corporate user can better leverage content created by others

Six, non-competing corporations create a pool of shared content to which they, and only they, have unlimited access, around core topics including sexual harassment an ethics. Team also create high quality shared templates for areas like new employee training, although use custom content with contempt.

Conclusion

There are three primary types of content: learning to know, learning to be, and learning to do. Learning to know has been dominated by Google. Learning to be has been dominated by Facebook, which has allowed users to control their own PR and circle of friends. There is one area left to create a world-leading organization – learning to do. Further, learning to do is more directly valued by organizations, and therefore can be the recipient of more direct funding from enterprises.

There are two critical needs of the same marketplace. Broad authoring tools for simulation, and a marketplace for simulations to be bought and sold. This marketplace would support competition, consistency, and end-user rating.

There are dozens of traps, of course. I can think of many places where this type of model would fail if the proper perspectives were not utilized.

But if done well, either marketplace or tools would transform the industry. Together it would revolutionize media.

See The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games.

You may also be interested in:

Assessment + MMORPG + Real World Challenges: How The MESH will Change Education

Simulations, Distance Learning, and Social Networking will enable the One Thousand Dollar MBA

The growing grey areas between: practioner, expert, student, and instructor.

This article was co-written by Tom Parkinson.

Organizations want their training and learning groups to take advantage of new capabilities and media (including blogs, wikkis, Facebook style apps, and sims), while avoiding any risks of being on the bleeding edge.

They want to develop and share more expertise. To do this, for examples, they might create the capability for:

• Casual YouTube style videos to quickly and cheaply explain some basic information;
• Richer communities of practice; and/or
• More powerful certification or other validated mission critical programs.

Below is a snapshot of the flow and the tools used to deliver the new skills (and please click to enlarge the picture). The four discrete core roles, one in each corner, are: practitioner, expert, student, and instructor.

Thematically, the most interesting areas are the ever-growing grey areas between the various discrete roles:

• Practitioner / Student: Practioners don't want to be taken out of the field to be "students", nor do sponsoring organizations want to pay the cost of practitioners being students. So this grey area is growing. Organizations are using short interventions, including traditional student frameworks, such as webinars; non traditional information sharing, such as podcasts and blogs; and learning-to-do techniques such as simulations and serious games.
  
  
• Expert / Instructor: The time when organizations would take their experts and move them to being a full-time instructor is long gone. But there are more "non-invasive" techniques to share the knowledge of the experts, including webinars and wikis and other methods mentioned above. Further, there are opportunities for experts to share without any involvement from the formal learning groups, such as blogs.
  
  
• Expert / Practitioner: Here, not only are practioners better able to find and teach each other, but practioners also see this grey area as a place to get promoted by establishing themselves as an expert. These communities are both vital and filled with sharp elbows.

The role of the arrows is to show the originating role (at the base of the arrow) and the destination role (at the tip of the arrow). For example, a traditional classroom goes from instructor to student. Where arrows either begin or terminate in grey space, that is a little interesting. Where there are no arrows and just icons, the ideas both begin and end in grey areas.

Is it time to reboot the eLearning industry? A new review of The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games

Dr. Jane Bozarth published her Learning Solutions Magazine review of The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games today.

In the time-honored PR tradition, I will skip over the parts where she disagrees with me (for example, she prefers the term Soft Skills to Big Skills, and most would agree with her). But I even want to skip over the parts where she calls the book wonderful and witty. (Well, mostly skip.)

Instead, Dr. Bozarth brings up a huge, sweeping point. She writes:

You know what I wish? If we had it to do over, I wish that the “e-Learning” business had started with this book. That this was the first thing trainers and training departments and creators of authoring tools had seen. “Computer games” were around before everyone had computers and Internet access and PowerPoint, and I wish e-Learning had started here, before online training as an industry managed to replicate the very worst elements of the traditional classroom experience. I wish this book as a starter gift for everyone who enters the e-Learning or training design and development field.

Again, read her whole piece here. Because she may be right. Maybe it is time to reboot, even re-imagine, the whole eLearning industry.

(BTW, if you click on the picture of the book, you will see the back of the book.)