Dr. Joshua Ray
Dr. Joshua Ray who serves as an associate professor of management in Tusculum’s College of Business, is collaborating with Dr. Eva Cowell from the University of Tennessee and Dr. Adam Smith from Indiana University Kokomo to research simulations. Dr. Cowell is a lecturer in the Management and Entrepreneurship Department in the Haslam College of Business at UT, and Dr. Smith is an associate professor of management at IU Kokomo’s School of Business.
The three of them are writing a paper on the subject and will now hold the roundtable “Teaching Simulations Best Practices” through the Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society. The roundtable will be held Saturday, June 19, via Zoom.
The conversation will enable participants to share their experiences with simulations. The final version of the paper the three faculty members prepare will incorporate feedback from the roundtable.
Simulation is part of the Business Policy and Strategy course Dr. Ray teaches. In that class, Dr. Ray breaks the class into teams, which choose a product they want to develop and then make various business decisions, such as its features, the cost to make it, sales markets, potential rebates and price variations in different locations.
Each team’s decisions are entered into the GLO-BUS simulation software, which creates a virtual market and ranks that product compared to those of the other teams in market share, stock returns and other metrics.
“We are pleased to engage fellow professionals in a discussion about simulation software’s impact on the learning environment,” Dr. Ray said. “Educators are always looking for innovative approaches in the teaching process, and we welcome the opportunity to hear from others about the way simulations can help prepare students for their careers.”
Anyone with questions about simulation courses can email Dr. Ray at jray@tusculum.edu.