Using SIMPLE at the University of the West of England Department of Law

Case study on the use of the SIMPLE application in the law school at the University of the West of England (UWE), one of five law schools participating in UKCLE’s SIMPLE project.

If you would like to know more about the use of SIMPLE at UWE contact Caroline Maughan on caroline.maughan@uwe.ac.uk

UWE planned to use SIMPLE for a module on the undergraduate law programme. They had run paper-based simulations for some years, but beyond using a VLE for uploading course materials had not used e-learning before. The simulation, to be run by a team of two tutors with the assistance of the deputy manager of UWE’s e-learning development unit, was scheduled for February 2008 with a pilot planned for November 2007.

Ultimately, although there was considerable simulation development, this SIMPLE project did not run.

Building the simulation

The course leader thought SIMPLE would provide a simplified way of managing the paper-based simulations she had used for some years. She was not confident about the IT, but pictured herself moving away from being overwhelmed with paperwork.

At that time the SIMPLE platform, which allows the simulation to be run, was not operational and its relationship with the SIMPLE tools, used to build the simulation, was unclear. In addition, the end user documentation was still under development. It was felt that the tools had been developed from a technical person’s point of view and that the majority of academic staff would not be able to use them without dedicated technical assistance, making the project unsustainable in the UWE context.

The concept diagrams to support the building of the simulation, known as narrative event diagrams or NEDs, were created on paper by the course tutors with help from members of the SIMPLE core team, however there were difficulties using the tools to recreate the NEDs.

Much time was spent in January 2008 trying to develop the simulation, but the UWE team did not feel confident that the tools, platform and support documentation were ready to be used in a high stakes learning scenario with students. They felt they would never be confident enough in using the software and were concerned about doing anything that could damage the existing close relationship between tutors and students.

The decision was taken not to go ahead with the SIMPLE based simulation – instead a paper-based simulation was run as in previous years.

General comments

The support received from the SIMPLE core team was thought to have been good – all noted bugs were looked into and questions answered, but the course leader felt she would have needed someone based on campus permanently to assist with getting the simulations up and running. The technical demands of the project were much greater than anticipated.

There is support for simulation learning at UWE and an opportunity to expand the scope of the simulations run at present, possibly assisted by online technologies.

Last Modified: 27 July 2010