Beyond Recreating The Classroom Experience: Why Online Simulations Work
People value in-person business simulations because they are hands-on. People are engaged. Decisions feel real. There is energy in the room, pressure from the clock, and a sense that what you do matters, even though it is a simulation. For many organizations, that combination is what makes simulations worth the time and expense.
Those qualities are not accidental. They come from being together, working through uncertainty at the same time, and reacting to outcomes you did not fully expect. The classroom provides conditions that support learning without anyone having to design for them explicitly.
So when the question can this be done online comes up, it is often a loaded one. The concern is not really about technology. It is about whether those hands-on qualities survive the move. Will people still care? Will decisions still feel connected to results? Will learning still stick? That is where the conversation often goes off track.
Explanation, Consequence, And Feedback
In a classroom, explanation plays an important role because it can be adjusted in real time. Facilitators explain things to the full group or to individual teams based on what they see in the room. They notice confusion, engagement, hesitation, or momentum. That feedback helps explanations land at the right moment and in the right amount.
Online, those signals are harder to see. Silence can mean understanding, distraction, or disengagement. It is harder to adjust explanations as things unfold. This does not make explanation unimportant, but it does make it harder to rely on as the main driver of learning.
What does carry over well from the classroom setting to an online setting is consequence. People learn when they make a decision, see what happens, and then have to make the next decision under slightly worse conditions. Online environments can support this just as well, as long as the consequences are built into the system rather than supplied by a facilitator.
Once explanation is less reliable, the design problem changes. The question stops being how to explain things better. It becomes how to let the system do more of the explanatory work.
Design Carries More Weight Online
In a classroom, facilitators often fill gaps without realizing it. They pause activity in the the room, restate a question, or help a team that is stuck. Online, those gaps are easier to see. If the model is unclear, people get stuck. If the feedback comes late or feels vague, people disengage. The system has to be clear in ways the classroom can afford not to be.
What also changes online is how repetition feels. In a classroom, repeating similar decision cycles can work because it feels like action. Teams talk, debate, react to each other, and the energy in the room keeps things moving even when the structure stays the same.
Online, that same repetition can feel flat. Without physical cues, side conversations, and shared urgency, repeated actions start to feel mechanical. What felt active in person can feel like busywork on a screen.
For that reason, moving a simulation online is not about reducing the number of decisions per round. It is about being careful about what changes from one round to the next, and how clearly people can see why those changes matter. Variety needs to come from consequences and context, not from asking people to do more.
Facilitation, Tone, And Engagement
A further shift online involves the role of the facilitator. In a classroom, the facilitator is often the center of activity. They set the pace, point out mistakes, redirect attention, and decide when it is time to move on. Much of the learning flows through that presence.
Online, that setup is harder to sustain. Facilitators still matter, but they cannot be everywhere at once, and they cannot see what the system does not show. To give the same level of real-time attention online, you would need many facilitators supporting many teams at once. That quickly becomes costly and hard to maintain.
This does not make facilitation less valuable. It changes where that value sits. When the system makes progress visible and consequences clear, facilitators can step back and focus on reflection rather than on keeping the experience running.
Tone also matters. A purely abstract or sterile interface can make an online simulation feel distant, especially when people are working alone. A small amount of whimsy can help lower that barrier and invite engagement.
Too much whimsy, however, becomes distracting. When visual or story elements compete with the underlying model, attention shifts away from the decisions themselves. The goal was not entertainment, but just enough texture to keep people engaged without hiding the financial structure.
We were similarly careful with comparison tools such as leaderboards. Used lightly, they can help people see patterns across teams and outcomes. Used too heavily, they pull attention away from reasoning and toward rank. The question is not whether competition is motivating. It is whether comparison helps people to understand what is happening.
What Moving Online Revealed
Moving online also surfaced strengths that are harder to see in a classroom. Distance stops mattering. Travel goes away. Schedules are easier to manage. Those benefits are real, but they are not the most interesting ones.
Online environments change how people show up. Lower visibility can reduce pressure, especially around financial topics. Some people are more willing to try something, get it wrong, and adjust when they do not feel exposed in the same way they might in a classroom.
Online simulations can also flatten hierarchy. In classrooms, senior voices often carry more weight, even when that is not intended. Online, decisions are more likely to be made individually or in small teams before being compared. That can reveal patterns and differences that are harder to see when discussion dominates.
Repeatability is another quiet strength. Online simulations are easier to run more than once, with small changes. People can see the same structure under different conditions without needing to reconvene in a room. Learning shifts from a single event to a series of encounters, where recognition builds over time.
One thing that didn't change was how reflection showed up. In both classroom and online settings, teams made sense of outcomes by talking through what happened—questioning assumptions, comparing interpretations, and deciding what to do next. The medium changed; the learning process did not.
Looking back, the most useful outcome of building the online version was not deciding which format was better. It was understanding more clearly what the simulation itself had to carry, and what the environment had been providing quietly all along.
The goal was not to recreate the classroom online. It was to design an experience that works under online conditions. One that depends less on explanation and presence, and more on structure, consequence, and repetition.
Once you see it that way, the question stops being whether a classroom simulation can be moved online. The more useful question is whether the experience can stand on its own. When learning relies on explanation and facilitation, it struggles online. When it relies on decisions, feedback, and consequence, it scales. That difference is easy to miss and expensive to ignore.
