What Are the Time Requirements for Instructors?

One of the biggest factors probably weighing on your mind if you are considering becoming a first-time user is “how much time will it take me to learn about The Business Strategy Game and then conduct the BSG exercise for my course?” Here are some honest estimates of what you can expect:

• You will need to familiarize yourself with the 4-page Quick Getting Started Guide that gets a first-time user of The Business Strategy Game off to a successful start in the shortest possible “gear-up” time — familiarizing yourself with the contents of the Quick Guide takes only about 1 hour if you are willing to trust our recommendations and less than 3 hours if you want to delve more deeply into “how things work” and decide for yourself how to organize your class into teams and what use to make of the optional quizzes, 3-year strategic plan assignments, end-of-exercise company presentations, and peer evaluations. At your leisure, you may find it useful to spend 30 minutes or so looking through the Player’s Guide that acquaints company co-managers with the digital camera industry, the ins and outs of company operations, the competitive factors that determine sales and market share, the kinds of decisions they will be making, and other key aspects of how The Business Strategy Game works.
• To launch The Business Strategy Game for your course, you have to go through the Course Setup procedures appearing on your Instructor Center screen. This entails specifying the number of companies you want to create to compete head-to-head (which is a function of expected class size and how many people you want to co-manage each company), selecting dates for each decision round to be completed, indicating which of the optional assignments you want company co-managers to complete (the quizzes, strategic plans, peer evaluations, and company presentation exercise), and making copies of the company registration codes and registration procedures to hand out to class members. Recommendations and thorough explanations are provided in the Course Setup links right on your Instructor Center screen. The Course Setup procedures will take 30-45 minutes the first time and about 30 minutes thereafter.
• It will take you 15-20 minutes to familiarize yourself with the PowerPoint slides that you can use to introduce the mechanics of The Business Strategy Game to class members.
• You absolutely are not going to get many questions at all from class members about “how things work.” Site navigation for company co-managers is simple and quickly learned. The Player’s Guide and the Help sections for all the decision screens and reports contain easy to understand explanations and provide complete guidance and decision-making tips. If a few of your students seem to be full of questions, it’s because they are coming to you for hand-holding and not taking the time to read and absorb the information at their fingertips.
• Once the Course Setup routine is completed, class members are registered, and the decision rounds are underway, everything occurs automatically until the exercise is complete. It’s your call whether to simply be an interested observer or play a more active, hands-on role. Expect to spend no more than 10-20 minutes per decision round if all you want to do is provide encouragement, review the scoreboard of company performances on your Instructor Center screen, solicit feedback from co-managers about how things are going, answer occasional questions, and deal with special problems—like moving co-managers to another team if there’s conflict among team members or adjusting the decision schedule to accommodate unanticipated events.

• If you want to delve into “what’s happening” more closely, you can spend 15-20 minutes after decision round browsing the Footwear Industry Report (which shows the details of each company’s performance and provides assorted financial and operating statistics) and the special Administrator’s Report (which provides a quick, convenient summary of select decisions and outcomes for each company that will keep you abreast of “what’s happening”).

  Should you prefer to be even more proactive and intimately involved, then after each decision round you can conduct a 5 to 10-minute “debriefing” at the beginning of selected classes on what’s happening in the industry (using information you’ve gleaned from the Footwear Industry Report and the Administrator’s Report). Because there’s tight connection between the issues that co-managers face in running their BSG company and the text chapters, you will find ample opportunity to use BSG happenings and managerial challenges as examples for your lectures. You can issue special news flashes altering certain costs or import tariffs. And you can offer to coach the co-managers of troubled companies on how to achieve better company performance.

• When all the decision rounds are completed, you will have to spend perhaps 30 minutes assigning grades (maybe longer if your class has 40+ students and you elect to peruse each class member’s activity log). Your online grade book automatically records and reports performance scores for all companies for all decision rounds and also contains each co-manager’s scores for all assignments (quizzes, strategic plans, and peer evaluations). Once you enter weights for each of the assignments, final scores for each class member are automatically calculated. You will have to decide whether to scale the scores or not. If you want to examine data pertaining to each co-manager’s use of the BSG-Online website as part of the grade assignment process, there’s an activity log that reports the frequency and length of log-ons, how many times decision entries were saved to the server each decision round, and how many times each set of reports was viewed each decision round.