Dress Up for the Class - Teaching with Simulations to Engage Students in Active Learning

Student-centred Learning

In this series of blogs, TaLT would like to explore the active and student-centred learning and share with you some great experience from our academics. In many cases, you will find the approaches quite handy and useful creating a student-centred and collaborative learning environment for our learners.

Dress Up to the Class

On 09.10.2017, the students in the BTF5340 Regional Trade Governance S2 2017 class all dress up and gather in the Racecourse Hotel function room next to the Caulfield campus. Their teachers Dr. Nicola Charwat and Ben Grunberg have set up the function room with round tables and afternoon tea for the simulated TOP Negotiating Round. About 60 students representing 10 Asia-Pacific countries are sitting in 6 negotiation tables and spend the afternoon to negotiate agreements on regional trade issues such as compulsory licensing, grant of patents, patent term extension, pharmaceutical data and marketing protection, biologic data and marketing protection, and tobacco-related exemptions.

Trans­‐Oceanic Partnership Intellectual Property Negotiation

The lecturers have prepared instructions for negotiation, negotiation issues summary documents, TOP - IP outstanding issues negotiating text, and other resources/readings on the faculty ePorfotilio system Mahara and use it as the virtual space for each country group to work on. Students have worked together throughout the semester to prepare negotiation strategy and discussion paper, position statement, this simulation, and the debrief/reflection. Two teachers move from table to table during the negotiation to observe and evaluate student performance.

The negotiation simulation encourages students to take initiative and actively engage in the study. Students organise the negotiation process quite nicely by sharing the agenda and prepare their materials in advance, use timer to keep each countries speeches in time so that every country can have a voice in negotiation, use technology to keep voting results and negotiation minutes.

The simulation finishes with a short report from each topic chairperson and the following debrief/reflection submission. An online survey is also published on Moodle to collect student feedback. Nicola has been doing this simulation for several years and has received very positive student feedback.

If You'd Like to Try

It is an interesting learning activity for the students. And if you would like to have a try, one lesson that we have learnt in the past is to break down the simulation into specific tasks with due dates. It will help the students to understand what they are supposed to do by time and prevent them from getting overwhelmed in the simulation. If you are interested and would like to talk to someone, TaLT is always there for you.


Reference
Faculty Focus (2017, 11 07). Using Role Play Simulations to Promote Active Learning:　https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/using-role-play-simulations-to-promote-active-learning/
University, C. (2017, 11 07). Teaching with Simulations. Retrieved from Carleton University: https://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/simulations/index.html