She was adamantly against simulations. Now she won't teach 1,000 students without one.

Plenty of instructors are wary of simulations, especially when a course already works and students are juggling the friction of online learning on top of everything else. Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management at McMaster's DeGroote School of Business, was one of them. She was, in her own telling, adamantly against them.

Then she was handed a hard problem. DeGroote asked her to help launch Integrated Business and Humanities, a new program built to produce Canada's next generation of business leaders. It needed real experiential learning, and it needed it for more than 1,000 students, online, scattered across every time zone. Faculty kept pointing her toward simulations. She kept resisting.

Every reason to say no

Her hesitation was specific, not vague. With students already frustrated by remote learning mid-pandemic, she didn't want to throw one more tool at them. She wasn't sure the value would outweigh the added cost her students would carry. And simulations had a reputation for being resource-intensive and hard to bend into an existing course.

So when she finally agreed to meet with Capsim, she came with requirements. Whatever she adopted had to be scalable to a large, global, virtual classroom; KPI-oriented, so she could use real output data to find knowledge gaps and have specific conversations with individual students; and well supported, so her students could get help across time zones when she couldn't be there.

Selling her own students first

Making the decisions themselves is what won them over.

Cossa didn't mandate the tool. She put it to the people paying for it. As she recalls telling her class:

I said to my students, "Listen, this is going to take a chunk of your time. I think this is what you're going to learn. But I want to get your feedback: is it worthwhile?" Because they were grumbling about the cost.Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management

She ran the first round of the business simulation and asked them straight out whether it was worth it. The verdict came back clearly on the side of doing over hearing.

It's one thing to talk about theory. It's something else to make decisions and to learn how these decisions impact different areas of business.Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management

Scaling to 1,000 students, in every time zone

Convincing students was one thing. Running a simulation for a thousand of them, worldwide, was another. Cossa is blunt about where the old way broke down: "When you have 1,000 students and more, it's just not scalable to have one person input KPI results for students." The fix was in the product.

I love the fact that today CapsimCore's product update allows me to pull an Excel or CSV file, and all of the student data is there. It minimizes human error, and manual inputting isn't required.Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management

Support had to scale with it. Her students tune in from six hours ahead in Egypt to nine and a half hours ahead in India, and the help has to reach all of them. One moment stuck with her. A Capsim team member, Tyler O'Neill, recorded a custom video walking through the practice-round results for her class.

The students clapped. He wasn't even there, but they were so relieved to hear someone enthusiastic and engaged explain the results and connect with them.Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management

From skeptic to standard

Today, every one of Cossa's courses runs on CapsimCore. In four weeks, her students run eight rounds, each a simulated year of strategy decisions that turn classroom concepts into real business calls, with competitive stakes: the top group earns full marks, the rest less, which keeps the pressure and the motivation up. The engagement she was chasing showed up as a sharper sense of how theory actually lands in a tricky business situation.

There's magic when bridging the gap between the theory covered in class and business practice.Rita Cossa, Associate Professor of Strategic Management

The professor who was adamantly against simulations now says she can't see a future without them, and plans to keep using them long after in-person learning returns. The skepticism, it turned out, was never really about simulations. It was about whether one could scale to her students without losing them. This one did.