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Case
Study: Virtual U
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Topics
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In 1997, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in conjunction with William Massy, former CFO for Stanford University and president of The Jackson Hole Higher Education Group, gave birth to the idea to create a computer simulation of university management in game form. The idea was to capture, as much as possible, the breadth of decision-making needed to guide a major university. Furthermore, since a university has many component departments and responsibilities, the people involved believed a comprehensive simulation might help people understand the impact each component of a university -- from admissions to facilities to faculty -- had on each other.
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Shot taken from Virtual University. Click
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The initial plan was to create "SimCity" for universities. With Dr. Massy's experience as a major university administrator and a seasoned economist and model builder, the foundation believed it could deliver on a vision to create new ways to educate. By packaging it as a game with the plan of fulfilling various scenarios to keep key components of the university's finances in balance, it was hoped the simulation would not only be accurate but relatively entertaining. The goal was to deliver a novel approach to teaching modern theory about university budgeting, operations, and leadership.
VU 1.0 was released in the fall of 2000 with a good level of press and paid media support. It has sold nearly 1,000 copies and the demo has been downloaded more than 15,000 times. A sampling of purchasers indicates that three or four other people have on average used each copy sold. To date more than a dozen schools and programs are using Virtual U as an integral part of their higher-education administration curriculum. With a further Sloan grant to the University of Pennsylvania the project expects to expand the number of classrooms using the software to more than two dozen, representing as much as 10 percent of the overall number of such classes that exist in the United States.
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