Abstract:

Business simulators cover the design and development of software, processes and best practices for integrating, warehousing and analyzing business information, so they are very useful to improve management decision making processes.

To ensure an effective learning, the students must get actively involved in the process and persevere with the game. Instructors must provide students constant advice and supervision, offering continuous feedback. As a consequence, business games are considered as an important tool to improve learning technologies, since usually develop most of the skills that students need to become effective entrepreneurs.

Through the development of an empirical model, this study focuses first on the feelings and opinions of the postgraduate students in distance university regarding both business games and its learning process; and second in the learning results and support received from both instructors and tutors. The proposed methodology estimates with quizzes the key variables that students might prefer.

With this study, it is possible to conclude that Business games are important learning tools to enhance the learning process of future entrepreneurs. Then, results also show which should be the key characteristics that a Business Game should have to reach this objective.

Keywords:

Learning technology, assessment, business games, learning support, enhanced technology, decision making, postgraduate students, experience-based learning, student learning.