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Organization Simulation for Interdisciplinary Learning

Design · All designs
Evidence · 1 claim (1 for) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Students form simulated consulting organizations (e.g., HR-service companies) that compete to win a real external client's request for tenders. Teams of 11-15 students, deliberately mixed across degree programs, take on internal roles (CEO, HR head, finance head, communications head) and spend a multi-week course iteratively producing a shared, evolving offer — the course's central knowledge object. An authentic external evaluator (a real HR professional) reviews and selects the winning offer, creating real stakes and a genuine success criterion beyond an instructor's grade.

Implications

Context

Requirements

  • A real external client/evaluator who issues an authentic request for tenders and gives feedback on both draft and final offers
  • Deliberately interdisciplinary team composition (the source study mixed educational psychology, engineering, economics, humanities, and education students in each team)
  • Weekly session structure combining brief disciplinary input (a lecture), extended self-organized team work time, and reflective closure
  • Material tools for externalizing and negotiating the shared object (whiteboards, shared documents) — teams that used these to shift from unfocused talk to structured problem-framing showed better integration

Constraints

  • Time pressure and unresolved role ambiguity are the most commonly reported barriers: teams without a clear, accepted leader reported disorganization, while teams where one member's leadership was contested reported conflict
  • Disciplinary differences in vocabulary and underlying assumptions (e.g., "leadership" meaning task-management to engineering students vs. people-management to education students) can cause friction and lost time before being explicitly surfaced
  • Additional mid-course disruptions (e.g., an unplanned "cooperation negotiations" task) are a deliberate design feature that forces re-organization — useful for building adaptive capacity, but adds real cognitive and coordination load

Grain Size

  • Course (the source study used a 6-week, 3.5-hour/week Master's course; 5 ECTS)

Target Goals

Target Learners

  • Higher-education students from mixed academic backgrounds working in unfamiliar teams; studied at the Master's level but not level-specific in principle

Theory

Supporting

Contradicting / Qualifying

  • The source study could not independently verify that all team activity met a strict definition of interdisciplinary integration (as opposed to parallel, divided-labor contribution), since the final offers themselves were not systematically analyzed for integration quality

Claims

Design

Sequence

  1. Week 1: Teams form; map individual expertise; establish an organization identity (name, logo, values) — an early knowledge object that builds group cohesion before the harder integrative work begins.
  2. Weeks 1-4: Teams iteratively draft, negotiate, and restructure a competing offer for the external client, informed by weekly disciplinary-content lectures (e.g., organization dynamics, mobile work, trust).
  3. Weeks 3-4: A game-based HR-competency activity and an annual HR resources plan introduce domain content in a low-stakes way before it is applied to the team's own offer.
  4. Week 5: An unplanned "cooperation negotiations" disruption forces teams to reorganize roles and priorities mid-stream, simulating real organizational complexity.
  5. Weeks 5-6: Teams finalize pricing, budget, and presentation; present the completed offer to the external client, who selects a winner.
  6. Throughout: Individual reflective learning diaries (graded 1-5) capture each student's personal sensemaking and application of concepts — the only individually assessed component; team artifacts themselves are not graded.

Affordances

Personalization

  • The specific simulated industry/client can vary; what matters structurally is a real external evaluator, a competitive framing, and a single evolving shared artifact
  • Diary-based individual reflection can be swapped for other individual-accountability mechanisms if diaries are not culturally or logistically suitable

Examples

  • Four course iterations at a Finnish university, 175 students total (84 in the analyzed sample), 12 teams; diary analysis (1,083 coded units) identified six recurring collective knowledge practices, and video analysis of two teams showed material tools (flip charts) mediating shifts from unfocused talk to structured, client-centered problem framing.

Key Sources

  • Muukkonen, H., & Kajamaa, A. (2024). Knowledge objects and knowledge practices in interdisciplinary learning: Example of an organization simulation in higher education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(2), 365-404. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2344794
Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id organization-simulation-for-interdisciplinary-learning
title Organization Simulation for Interdisciplinary Learning
description A higher-education pattern in which interdisciplinary student teams role-play a consulting organization competing to win a real external client's business, building a shared, evolving proposal as the vehicle for interdisciplinary integration.
status review
grain_size course
author Muukkonen & Kajamaa
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — muukkonen-kajamaa-2024

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