Why Every Student Should Register

The online 8th edition of The Business Strategy Game creates a global market environment in cyberspace where students can engage in running companies in head-on competition with companies run by other class members. They have to craft strategies and make decisions in a variety of functional areas, and they get valuable practice in applying the core concepts and analytic tools of strategic analysis. The BSG-Online exercise capitalizes on the Internet's "anywhere, anytime" educational capabilities and, in effect, serves as a virtual classroom that is an integral adjunct to your course.

Just as you expect that students must officially register for your course, attend regularly, and fully participate in your classroom activities, so also should they be expected to be officially registered for the online 8th edition of The Business Strategy Game and to be fully participating members in the adjunct classroom exercise that you have incorporated.

All company co-managers need to attend the virtual BSG-Online classroom so they can work effectively together. The online 8th edition of The Business Strategy Game is fundamentally a team activity. The team atmosphere in a simulation is adversely affected when some students on a team register and others are allowed to be free-riders.

Moreover, BSG-Online records and reports individual participation in your online BSG-Online grade book (along with the decision-by-decision company performances). There are two accompanying quizzes taken online, plus participants are expected to complete 12-question peer evaluations of all company co-managers at the end of the exercise to provide you with a check on each manager’s contributions and participation during the exercise. The quiz scores and the peer evaluation scores are automatically recorded in your online grade book to make it quick and convenient for you to monitor and evaluate performance and assign individual grades. Failure of students to register means that you will not get a report containing the individual performances of all class members. There is also an internal e-mail system that automatically notifies all registered participants of the availability of decision results, any changes in the decision schedule, and any BSG-Online-related messages that you opt to send out — students who don’t register can get left out of the loop. The entire BSG-Online exercise functions more smoothly from an instructor perspective when all class members are registered.

Thus, the copyright and intellectual property issues, the team nature of the exercise, and the desire to provide you with seamless, convenient use of BSG-Online in your course explains why you are asked to accept the User Agreement:

User Agreement

Should I adopt the online 8th edition of The Business Strategy Game for use in my course, I agree to ask every student enrolled in my course to register at the BSG-Online Web site (www.bsg-online.com) and I agree to encourage student respect for the intellectual property and copyrights of the authors and the publisher, McGraw-Hill.

I understand that BSG-Online will inform me via e-mail when there are important system changes, program updates, or special events that impact the use of The Business Strategy Game in courses that I am teaching.