SIMPLE: learning through simulations

In their paper Karen Barton (Glasgow Graduate School of Law) and Patricia McKellar (UKCLE) presented the findings of the SIMPLE project and considered ways to take the project forward.

The session was blogged on Zeugma. To find out more see the SIMPLE project page and Karen and Patricia’s slides (embedded below).

Game-based learning and simulations are powerful modes of learning, used by industries as diverse as aviation and health sciences. While there are many generic VLEs available to further and higher education, there is no widely available open source Web-based simulation environment for professional learning.

The two year SIMPLE (simulated professional learning environment) project, a partnership between the University of Strathclyde and UKCLE, designed, created, implemented and evaluated such an environment. SIMPLE has been piloted by six law schools and three other disciplines (architecture, management science and social work), creating simulations that place both undergraduates and postgraduates in a professional context where their work is, as it will be in the workplace, distributed between tools, colleagues and resources, as well as encountering anticipated and unanticipated problems.

The open source SIMPLE application, together with supporting guidance, is now available to the legal education community. The project has implications not just for university-based courses, but also for trainee education programmes, ongoing professional training and speciality accreditation within the legal profession. It demonstrates that simulation is a powerful heuristic, capable of supporting transformative shifts in education, but that the implementation of such an environment calls for a number of changes to some fundamental practices in higher education:

• teaching staff need design support to gain the necessary skills to create effective simulations which integrate outcomes and methodologies of teaching and learning
• teaching staff need practice in building resources for simulation and re-thinking assessment practices
• management at departmental, faculty and probably institutional level need to give thought to different employment practices within cadres of staff to support such forms of learning, resource building and assessment
• institutions and disciplines need to consider the new forms of collaborative activity facilitated by simuation practice

Glenn Robinson (BPP) reports:

The SIMPLE project allows course and module designers to produce simulated learning tasks whereby students work in teams to address a series of legal issues generated by documents and other stimuli released to the students along a timeline designed and controlled by the staff members responsible for the overall task.
 
As Karen and Patricia demonstrated SIMPLE represents a significant advance in the production of simulated learning environments, due to the accessible and intuitive nature of the software. SIMPLE allows the loading of various documents with differing time release dates, so that once the simulation has commenced the project manager acts as a facilitator and monitor and is not obliged to actively intervene by adding documents at any point. The project allows for an holistic and complete approach for the whole simulation process.
 
Questions from the floor were taken, notably on the advantage that SIMPLE could possess over a traditional paper-based process. The presenters countered by pointing out the automatic, flexible and efficient nature of the SIMPLE model.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010