e-OPEQ: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Remote Delivery

Rows of empty wooden seats in a lecture hall, representing an educational setting.

When the COVID-19 crisis forced all Wharton courses and classes online in March, many faculty members were caught off-guard and scrambled to adapt their in-person lectures and labs for distance learning. Naturally, the Learning Lab saw an opportunity to help. Our team immediately got to work identifying universally applicable business…

Pivot or Perish: How to Survive the Retail Apocalypse

Digital representation of holographic figures pushing shopping carts through a virtual environment, with binary code and digital screens. Twitter thread by Neil Saunders, of GlobalData Retail, on Macy's Feb. 4 re-org announcement. Suffice it to say that Macy’s did not get what it wanted for Christmas, and is taking it pretty hard. In early February, following a disappointing holiday sales season, the legacy retailer announced it will close...

uSciences e-Learning 3.0 Conference: “This is Not (Just!) a Simulation”

A person giving a presentation in a classroom setting. The screen displays a slide titled "About the Learning Lab," with text detailing the lab''s activities and support. Several people are seated, one using a laptop.

Over the past few decades, online learning has evolved from the so-called 1.0 phase (in-person classes augmented by static web pages and PDFs) to the more revolutionary 2.0 stage (i.e., the dawn of online courses, classroom-blended “talking head” videos, and rudimentary analytics) to today, as the 3.0 era (high-tech custom…

VR in the Classroom: If We Get This Right, Nobody Explodes

People using virtual reality headsets and controllers in a technology lab setting, surrounded by computers and office furnishings.

STAY TUNED: This is the first of a few “insider” posts with IT Tech Director Joe Lee, as he looks at the educational use of Oculus Go through the lens of the Wharton Learning Lab…   Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a cooperative, team-based game where one player is…

Guest Post: Student Researcher Cracks Open the Case for Classroom AR

A digital representation of technology and global connectivity, featuring a globe surrounded by icons and graphs, with devices like a laptop and smartphone interconnected.

As the Learning Lab continues to explore applications for augmented reality (AR) in higher ed – specifically, in the business-school setting – we are eager to give voice to fresh perspectives and innovative experimentation with the technology. This week we’re excited to hand our blog space over to Wharton student…

Penn’s Startup School Gets into the (Startup) Game

A light bulb inside a chalk-drawn thought bubble on a blackboard, symbolizing an idea or inspiration.

For Wharton student Abhinav Kajaria (‘20), entrepreneurship is in his blood. His family’s home-improvement business was started by his grandfather, passed down to his father, and soon after he graduates, Kajaria – who co-founded Mumbai-based micro-finance NGO 1Ghar while still in high school – will take over the reins, “helping…

Style Points: Augmented Reality and the Tailored Learning Experience

A digital representation of technology and global connectivity, featuring a globe surrounded by icons and graphs, with devices like a laptop and smartphone interconnected.

In case you missed the memo, the next wave of the Digital Revolution – in the form of immersive computing – is rapidly approaching the shores of higher ed, and with it, one of the greatest opportunities to transform learning in a generation. Surfing along the crest of this radical…

Learning Lab = World-Class Games for a Global University

A hand holding a globe with diverse chalk-drawn icons around it on a blackboard, symbolizing global ideas and innovation.

What do the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the IE Business School in Madrid, HEC Paris, and Dubai’s S P Jain School of Global Management all have in common with Wharton? Well, besides being among the Financial Times‘ top-ranked MBA programs in 2017, they all use simulation games…

SIMPL: One Data Model to Rule Them All

Illustration of digital marketing concepts with a globe, devices, envelopes, and arrows, symbolizing global communication and connectivity.

Code starts at the model-level. So before we wrote one line of SIMPL (the Learning Lab’s new simulation framework), we needed to figure out what, exactly, our data model would look like. Considering the ambitious goal of the project — a simulation framework that could support all of our current games…

SIMPL Magic: Automatic Browser Page Updates

Illustration of digital marketing concepts with a globe, devices, envelopes, and arrows, symbolizing global communication and connectivity.

In multiplayer web-based games, all users should be able to see up-to-date game data without having to manually refresh their browsers. For example, players need to be notified when the game has moved from a phase in which they can submit decisions to a phase in which they cannot submit…