Students called this required course "boring." Now demand is up 405%.

When Dr. Hakim Meshreki turned his end-of-year course evaluations into a word cloud, the biggest word on the screen was the one no instructor wants to see: boring. His Introduction to Business course, a required course at The American University in Cairo, was doing everything a traditional course is supposed to do, presentations, quizzes, a semester project, exams, and losing the room in the process.

A required course nobody looked forward to

In 2015, the course checked every box for a traditional required class, and students felt it.

It was really, an extremely boring course. Students were really bored in this course.Dr. Hakim Meshreki, Assistant Professor

The deeper problem ran past the syllabus. Most of Meshreki's students had never seen how a business actually runs, so the theory had nothing to hook onto. "They had no idea how a business functions," he said.

Meshreki teaches from both sides of the desk. He is also CEO of Menatec, a family manufacturing business, so he knew firsthand how far classroom theory can sit from practice. "Teaching only theory in the classroom isn't the way to teach anymore," he said.

Rebuilding the course around decisions

He didn't change what the course was about. He changed what students did in it.

So Meshreki and his colleagues went looking for experiential, simulation-based tools, and rebuilt the course around a Capsim business simulation using a flipped-classroom model. Instead of lecturing at students, he put them inside a company and made them run it.

So you give students real-world situations, a mortar of experiential learning opportunities. And they start exploring how different departments in the business interact, and what kind of decisions they need to take.Dr. Hakim Meshreki, Assistant Professor

The change went past the content to the room itself.

Simulations help revamp the way we teach, the way the classroom is set up, even the physical setup changed. Because it's no longer just lecturing, it's more group work, students making decisions, collaborating and discussing in class about what happened last time, what could we have done to improve our decisions?Dr. Hakim Meshreki, Assistant Professor

What changed first: the room

The results, Meshreki says, were almost immediate, and they showed up as engagement long before they showed up as enrollment.

If I can sum it up, it's the spirit and the passion that changed inside the classroom. We went from a mono-lecturing technique with only the professor leading, to hosting open discussions. Very soon, the students became more engaged. They're much, much more willing to participate. You can feel the difference between the before and after.Dr. Hakim Meshreki, Assistant Professor

The clearest sign was who showed up, and when. "Students are more engaged. They're coming in even after class hours for office hours to ask what they did wrong and how they can improve," Meshreki said. "The spirit inside the classroom even changed."

Then demand followed

The word of mouth reached enrollment. What began in 2015 as a pilot, three sections of 30 students, has grown to 13 sections of 35: from 90 students a semester to 455. That is a 405% increase in demand for a course students once called boring.

Ten years on, the simulation is a fixture, and so is Meshreki's own habit with it. He has played it more than 2,000 times. "I play every single day, aside from skipping about 10 days a year for vacation," he said.