Debriefing in Moodle: Written feedback on trust and knowledge sharing in a social dilemma game

Abstract

This article describes a new approach to debriefing that uses the discussion forum feature of the Moodle open source course management system to debrief a simulation game with undergraduate business students. The simulation game allowed the students to experience the fragility of trust when sharing knowledge in a global virtual project team. I found using the Moodle forum for gathering written feedback on the task to be an improvement over verbal feedback sessions used with previous classes. The Moodle forum provides spontaneous and simultaneous rich feedback from a larger number of students and increases their awareness of the complexity of the task. It became clear to the students that there was no blueprint for success in the game but that participants each had to make sense of the experience in their own way.