His caution is not unwarranted. Beyond the thorough integration of VU, he was challenged to deliver a number of firsts when planning his course. Richardson has not taught this class since the spring of 1999 at Arizona State University. "In only four years all of the material has changed," he reports. "In fact, there’s only one reference on my current NYU syllabus that has survived." He is also the first faculty member to design a doctoral-level higher education economics and finance course at NYU. While most doctoral programs in higher education offer a course in the economics and finance of higher education, prior to the spring of 2003, NYU had offered the course only at the master’s level. "Doctoral students could take the class, but it didn’t have the intensity and focus of most courses at that level," says Richardson. "As a faculty, we decided that we had to have the course and that I was the right person to teach it."

With a license to experiment, Richardson set out to design the new course. His decision to incorporate VU was due as much to serendipity as strategy. "I was considering how I would teach the course at the same time I was invited to the VU First Adopters meeting in Philadelphia," Richardson explains, "It was an irresistible temptation to explore whether or not the simulation could make the course more interesting and add an element that reinforced student learning and enhanced students’ experience."

The First Adopters Meeting provided Richardson with an opportunity to speak with other faculty VU users, and to gather their good ideas and helpful syllabi. As did many First Adopters, he incorporated VU into his Spring 2002 course, although more as an add-on assignment than an integrated element. It was a governance course, and Richardson believes that earlier versions of the software made few contributions to discussions of governance and policy. However, he reports, because the simulation emphasizes budgeting and finance functions, it has had a major impact on the design of the inaugural doctoral-level higher education economics and finance course at NYU.

Richardson’s ultimate intention is to determine the added value that VU provides as an integral part of the curriculum tied closely to weekly course content. While he is unsure of the outcome, he does have confidence that the experiment will yield evidence on VU’s utility. "We’re open-minded about its potential, and think it could provide a good way to teach higher education finance and economics," he explains. "But it obviously takes a great deal of time to implement the simulation if you use it beyond anything other than a demonstration. There’s a lot of time and effort involved to use it in a meaningful way." To determine the advantages and disadvantages of such a thorough integration, Richardson will attempt a cost-benefit analysis of his model for using VU.

Foundations and Familiarity

Such an experiment represents a tall order for one faculty member to fulfill. Richardson has one advantage that may, in the end, minimize his concerns: many of his Spring 2003 students have had some previous exposure to VU, including the two graduate students he enlisted to assist in course design and to serve as leaders in the classroom. In fact, three-quarters of the students in his economics and finance course were also enrolled in last year’s governance class and, therefore, have some familiarity with the simulation. "While last year we used the program as a short-term activity working with a scenario—more like "playing a game"—these students know that in taking this class they would make use of it in a different, more intensive way," Richardson says.

Two graduate students, Christine Shakespeare and Tara Parker, doctoral candidates in education at NYU, have been helping Richardson develop approaches for applying VU in his economics and finance course. Both were enrolled in Richardson’s governance class in the spring of last year, are enrolled in his economics and finance class this year, and work with the senior faculty member on various research projects.

While Richardson jokes that Shakespeare and Parker "were not exactly uncoerced" to help him design the syllabus, they both expressed excitement about the project from the beginning and visited the VU Team at the ASHE conference in Sacramento to further explore the software’s capabilities. "My situation is ideal, because I am fortunate enough to be working collaboratively with these students, and I knew they could help contribute more time and effort to the simulation than I could by myself. It was obvious to me that, to get the most out of using VU, I needed some help. This was not something that I—or most faculty members—have the time to pursue," says Richardson.

And because his graduate assistants are also enrolled in the course, they can help not only with effective integration but also implementation. "Christine and Tara will each chair a student team," Richardson explains, "so I’m guaranteed that at least two of the four teams will have good leadership. I will also ask them to keep an eye on the other groups so we won’t have 13 students on their own. It’s a more efficient use of my time as well. I can work with them, and then they will work with the students as they use the simulation."

One of the primary reasons Richardson introduced VU in his 2002 governance course was to test student reactions and incorporate their feedback into the design of the new economics course. To learn from what his students encountered, he asked Shakespeare and Parker to synthesize comments from each student team’s evaluations of their experiences. "In general," says Parker, "the students reported that they enjoyed using it, that it was a fun tool. But the biggest complaint was that they didn’t have sufficient time to become familiar with it." Shakespeare reports another difficulty: "Many students felt VU would be more useful if there was a closer relationship between the simulation and the course content. In a way, we are testing the proposition that such a relationship can be built." These findings informed how the team approached their design of the economics course.

Cooperation and Confidence

Richardson also relied on student input from Shakespeare and Parker to help shape the course and engagement with the simulation. "I think it requires more than one person’s imagination to develop a curriculum like this, and Tara and Christine’s contributions to the design of the simulation’s use have been critical," he says. Richardson began by developing the basic syllabus, indicating course content and how the course itself would be generally organized. He then shared a copy of the syllabus with them, with the request to consider how VU might fit with the content.

"It is really their ideas regarding the simulation that have shaped VU’s integration," he says, "and we are working together to incorporate course content and VU use." For example, Shakespeare and Parker were responsible for realizing a major shift in the syllabus: extending the time that student teams would have to become acquainted with the software from one class session to one in-class orientation along with three full weeks of independent time outside of class.

The graduate students also authored a detailed description of student expectations, to be distributed at the first class session. "From our experience last year, we thought students needed to know exactly what is expected of them and how they will be using the simulation," Parker comments, "as well as spell out how it relates to course content."

Their considerable effort has resulted in a highly integrated syllabus that ties out-of-class and team-based work in the VU environment with in-class discussion and readings from the literature. Although it has taken nearly a year to develop the course, Richardson believes that the benefits will extend well into future semesters. "Once we have run through this course the first time, I don’t expect to need the same kind of graduate assistance," he says. "Once I understand exactly what VU can contribute to the course and we develop the associated background material, it will be much easier to repeat the course in subsequent terms."

Integration and Implementation

The team’s approach to an integrated course design is to categorize the variables that can be manipulated in the VU environment, dividing them into related sets that map—as closely as possible—to the course content covered each week. "Most of the things we talk about in the course have some parallel in sets of variables that exist within the VU model," says Richardson. "Our intent was for students to use the weekly iterations of the game as opportunities to explore what we discussed in class during that session."

Richardson expects that the link between VU and course lessons such as financial aid, college and university budgeting, or resource allocation can be easily integrated. But he anticipates it will be more difficult to link more theoretical or contextual items with such a practically oriented game. He hopes that new features in 2.05, such as the policy screen, offer promise for addressing content such as "the political and social environment."

The first class session is dedicated to orienting students to the VU simulation, making team assignments, and conveying course expectations: how their teams will use the software and how they will make connections between their virtual institutions and lessons in class. Richardson plans to demonstrate VU for the benefit of students who have not been exposed to the software and assign a scavenger hunt to be completed in class along with an assignment to be completed outside of class. The scavenger hunt will be designed to introduce not only VU but also the structure of the course. Each student will receive a copy of the software on CD, along with files such as PowerPoint slides and other materials to support their use.

Following the first class session, VU becomes a matter of team-based work completed outside of class. Constrained by time limitations and one in-class session per week, Richardson, Shakespeare, and Parker decided to make VU use external to students’ classwork. "Our classes only meet for 1 hour and 35 minutes once per week, so there is relatively limited time to accomplish all of the course goals and also spend time in class on the simulation. So we decided to make it an out-of-class activity, done on a week-by-week basis in student teams," says Shakespeare.

Because more than half of the students are enrolled part-time and do not live on campus, the teams will use the web-based software Blackboard to communicate with one another, create their institution, decide which variables to manipulate and how, and discuss the results. Using this electronic class management program, students will be able to post and retrieve documents, set up group chats, and manage their work. Richardson will establish a group page for every VU team in the course.

"One of the key reasons why we can teach this kind of course in the amount of time allowed is because we make extensive use of the Blackboard site and its communications capabilities," says Richardson. "It’s the software that really makes this possible." He believes that Blackboard will serve as an important element of the course, since much of the effort is dedicated to independent work in the VU environment. Students will load Virtual U onto their home computers and run the simulation individually, using the same parameters. They will then use Blackboard to manage their discussion.

Working in teams, Richardson’s students will have three weeks to create a customized institution. "Rather than play preset scenarios, like we used for simplicity in the governance course, I will ask each group to create their own campus. For the purposes of the course, the teams need not create the same type of institution—the only important element is that it has characteristics that interest the group, in terms of the campuses where they currently are or where they anticipate working," Richardson explains.

After the second week, the teams will be instructed to arrive in class prepared to discuss the strategic goals that their customized institution will pursue. After the third week, they must submit a written description of the goals and their campus’s characteristics. They will run the simulation for ten years and save the game—and then return to this point in time each week, when they will be asked to manipulate a different set of variables that relate to in-class instruction. The teams will collectively decide which variables to change and by what degree. By returning to this baseline, Richardson believes, they will be able to discern how policy and allocation changes in different areas affect overall institutional performance.

Richardson explains the process and his intentions: "In a given week, students would start the simulation at the 10-year baseline, manipulating a selected set of variables that correspond to course content and running the simulation for ten years of the institution’s life. The idea is for them to change the variables in ways they think will meet the objectives they have established for the virtual institution and then to get a sense of what an institution can accomplish in that time period."

Gauging Progress

Throughout the semester, each team will be required to submit a report on the outcomes of their simulations. They will be expected to recount what they accomplished and what they learned—in what ways did their choices to manipulate certain variables move them closer to or further away from the objectives they established at the time they designed their institutions? What did they learn about the interactions of the variables themselves, in terms of the importance of achieving the objectives they set out to accomplish?

Summative work in VU includes an exercise in manipulating all of the variables at once, so that students can apply the knowledge they gained in class about higher education finance and management to serve as guiding principles for decision-making. Students will also be asked to prepare a final policy brief at the end of the semester to integrate the lessons learned. "The policy brief is a nice, practical way to bring everything together," says Shakespeare. "Students will ‘report’ the brief to their board of trustees, synthesizing what they’ve done in practical language, why they chose to manipulate certain variables, what they thought they would achieve, and what the results were, as well as how it relates to their overall strategy." She also believes that these policy briefs provide a good opportunity for future higher education administrators or faculty to practice the preparation of these types of reports.

Most faculty in the Virtual Update user community have not assigned grades for students’ work in the simulation. However, Richardson has decided not only to assign grades but also to allot 30 percent of each student’s final grade to their performance in team scenarios and reports. "Given the magnitude of work we expected people to do with the simulation, we thought it was reasonable to assign such a weight in determining their grades," he says.

Lessons Learned

When pressed to relate "lessons learned," Richardson hesitated, preferring to wait until his experiment has been fully executed. "If it works, it will almost guarantee that VU is integrated in the course as it is regularly offered," he says. "We have confidence that it will be a nice complementary activity, but do not know whether it will realize substantial gains in student learning." Until the results are in, he does offer a few tips he believes he is ready to support.

1. Put everyone in the driver’s seat. Richardson, Shakespeare, and Parker all agreed that students should share perspectives, not computer screens. They based their conclusions in part on student evaluations from the governance class, in which one student on the team would do most of the work, and the others would sit back and watch. In addition, Richardson observed the same dynamic at the First Adopters meeting, where the "driver" gained more from the simulation than the "passenger." "We are purposefully trying to arrange the class so that there is more individual participation and involvement by each student—and hence greater learning," he says. "The people who were watching in Philadelphia didn’t get much out of it." By distributing CD-ROMs to each student and requiring them to run simulations on their home computers, they will interact online around their ideas and not the simulation itself. The instructor and his assistants hope that this strategy will not only address the difficulties students face in meeting outside of class but also increase the impact of VU on their learning.

2. Build on the work of your peers. While their effort was substantial, this NYU team had the benefit of their colleagues’ work on which to draw. Both Shakespeare and Parker report that posted course materials and feature stories on Virtual Update provided a wealth of information when they were considering how to integrate the simulation in more thorough ways. They benefited from the lessons many First Adopters have learned over the last year, as well as the syllabi and models they have shared. In fact, they adapted two items from Joshua Powers’ course: his ever-popular scavenger hunt and the concept for a final policy brief. "The best use of our time is to be able to efficiently download innovative ideas from a website so that you do not have to reinvent the wheel," Shakespeare says. "We found the Virtual Update website an easy way to find the latest information about VU—for instance, that is how we learned about the state appropriation report page and the VU movie that highlights the latest changes to the VU software."

A Follow-Up

Richardson believes faculty should expect marginal gains with marginal applications of VU. "Dipping your toe in the VU waters most likely has only a minimal benefit," warns Richardson. "You have to devote enough time to get students familiar with it and get them involved in using it." Yet, faculty members’ willingness to dedicate time and effort to achieving a more thorough integration will be less likely without proof of its feasibility and added benefit. Richardson sees his economics and finance course as a distinct opportunity to address the value-added question. "Because it was an add-on before, I’m not sure how much we gained in the governance class beyond the familiarity that will carry over into this class," he says. "But this course is our real test."

Accordingly, many of Richardson’s responses were prefaced with the equivalent of "Stay tuned," since the most important element of this story—students’ experiences with a highly integrated syllabus—has yet to occur. However, the Penn VU Team plans to work with Richardson to track students’ evolving engagement with the simulation and to receive his assessment of students’ experiences at the end of the semester. When the final results are in, they will be reported in a follow-up feature story based on interviews, course evaluations, and students’ written reports, to be posted in a future edition of Virtual Update.