Abstract
Digitalisation nowadays impacts business environments significantly. Therefore, if higher education wants to educate students properly for a successful career path, the business and economics curriculum must be enriched with innovative teaching approaches covering actual topics, such as, for example, the implementation of the ERPsim business simulation, a representative of serious games. The ERPsim business simulation is based on SAP ERP, and is aimed at teaching ERP concepts. It covers different business processes, and allows students to learn using a hands-on approach, simulating real-life scenarios. The presented research focuses on using an ERPsim business simulation as the introduction to the course. The simulation was implemented to ease the introduction of ERP and IT concepts to the business and economic oriented students. Considering the positive effects of serious games and gamification, our research was formed and focused on knowledge acquisition and future student engagement. We researched whether participation in the introductory simulation results in significant knowledge gain and impacts students’ future course engagement. The data were gathered using a self-assessment questionnaire before and after an introductory simulation. The results were highly positive, confirming many positive aspects of business simulation, among others, significant knowledge increase in the domains of business process and ERP transactions, and in the domain of technical knowledge for SAP ERP. The results confirmed that the introductory simulation is appropriate for introducing ERP concepts to newcomers, and, nevertheless, confirmed the positive impact on their intent on future course engagement.
Highlights
Received: 15 November 2021Digital transformation is increasingly important in many areas, including education.Nowadays, students are being educated and prepared to work successfully in highly digital environments
The ERPsim simulation was developed to ease the understanding of complex and challenging thematic connected to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems [36,37], and can help students in gaining missing business and IT knowledge [36]
In comparison to related work, our study focuses on researching the positive aspects of using a business simulation as an introduction to a course, wherein the traditional teaching approaches are implemented in the continuation of the course
Summary
Digital transformation is increasingly important in many areas, including education. Students are being educated and prepared to work successfully in highly digital environments. The strong involvement of advanced information and communication technology (ICT) represents an important and necessary part of education. This is especially true for higher education, which represents the final step before employment. The business and economic education is no exception. Digitalisation has already impacted strongly and transformed the abovementioned domain significantly. The reflection of digitalisation topics in the current business and economics curriculum is a highly important topic
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