Olds College has tested a new learning method over the summer that officials with the school believe will better prepare students for the world of work once they leave the campus.
Olds College has tested a new learning method over the summer that officials with the school believe will better prepare students for the world of work once they leave the campus.
Beginning in September, all students enrolled in 16-week programs or longer will be required to do a self-directed business course as part of graduation requirements. It’s part of a broader mandate at the college that will see all faculty, staff and students using iPads as a basis of any course on campus. Faculty and staff began receiving iPads in January and have been familiarizing themselves with the technology.
Students are required to have an iPad 2.0 or higher to have the ability to download "The Spirit of Entrepreneurship" game, in which students build a lemonade stand business.
"One of the key features that students will have the opportunity to experience is an entrepreneurship course that we have worked with developers in Calgary to gamify. It allows them to learn the essential skills related to entrepreneurship," said Jason Dewling, the college’s vice-president of academic and research.
While the game is not a credit course, students will be required to complete it before they graduate. Dewling said faculty and staff strongly believe the course will enable students to get a basic grasp of business principles that they will need once they graduate. The course involves students operating the lemonade stand in a community and adjusting their business plan as the game progresses in order to make the business more profitable. Students make decisions on marketing, human resources and other business-related aspects to improve the profitability of their business.
"As they build that business of lemonade stands, colas and power drinks, they’re applying the principles that are contained within the course," he said.
Dewling said the feedback from the testing phase was positive and will be incorporated into the game as later versions of it are developed. High school students doing coursework through distance learning also tested the game earlier in the 2012-13 school year.
Dewling said the course will remain active on the students’ iPads for five years from the time they download it.
"We know that through statistics that students don’t often go and set up their own businesses, but later, anywhere from five to 10 years after they graduate, is when they’re most likely to go out on their own," he said.
Dewling said because many of the programs that the college offers, such as landscaping, a meat processing program, a farrier program and others, lend themselves to small business, the course will be invaluable for the students.
"Often the training within those (courses of study) do not give them those essential concepts to be successful in business. We believe that this course will give them both that ability to have some foundation in business, but also give all our students exposure to an entrepreneurial way of thinking," he said.
The game was developed by Leslie Roberts of GoForth Institute, which focuses on entrepreneurship training. Roberts interviewed 200 successful entrepreneurs and incorporated input she received from those entrepreneurs into the game.
"This is really a different kind of curriculum. It’s well developed," Dewling said, noting this type of game-based learning has previously not been used by post-secondary institutions to supplement curriculum. "We’re really blazing a new trail in education."
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