A Distributed Management Simulation Game for Teaching e-Collaboration Skills

This article first identifies social and psychological skills as some of the most important elements for e-collaboration, and proposes the use of management simulation games as a very effective learning tool to teach these skills. These games rely on the principle of exposing and familiarizing the learner in a risk free environment to a variety of collaborative mechanisms and practices related to collaboration with a particular emphasis on the sociological and psychological dimensions. The learning objective of these games is to teach the learner about these collaborative practices and mechanism, to stimulate to the adoption of these practices, but also to help him/her setting-up and managing high performing collaborative teams. This paper then stretches some design principles of such games for teaching collaboration that are based on agent-enhanced multi-users distributed role playing simulations, in which the users are engaged into collaborative activities with other (real or simulated) participants.