An interactive dynamic simulation model of a university management system

The main objective of this research is to construct an interactive simulation model, on which a range of problems concerning the academic aspects of a university management system can be analyzed and certain policies for overcoming these problems can be tested. More specifically, the model focuses on long-term, strategic university problems that are dynamic and persistent in nature, such as growing student-faculty ratios, poor teaching quality, low research productivity. The model generates numerous performance measures about the three fundamental activities of a university, namely, teaching, research and professional projects. To construct such a game, a system dynamics model of the major academic aspects of a university system is built. The "model is validated and verified by standard tests, using data from Bogaziqi University. After these tests, some scenario experiments are done to test and demonstrate the analysis capabilities of the model. Next, the necessary changes are made on the model to construct the interactive gaming version and the gaming interface is programmed. The game has been played and tested by a group of faculty members, teaching assistants and students. Finally, the game results of these players are compared. Differences in performances reveal that players with different orientations focus on different performance measures in making decisions. This paper reports results of ongoing research. At this stage, we can state that the interactive simulation model has proven to be a useful laboratory to support not only practical debate, but also theoretical research on how to cope with "Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.(ACM). To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee." © 1996 ACM 0-89791-820-7 96 0002 3.50 120 strategic university management problems. I. I N T R O D U C T I O N Administrators of contemporary universities face the challenge of maintaining the quality of the fundamental functions of a university, namely teaching, research, academic and professional service, while tying to serve the students, under the pressure of limited resources in terms of faculty, facilities and income [4, 9, 16, 18]. The problems that contemporary university administrations face and possible solutions have been studied both on macro and micro levels by many researchers. Some of these studies were based on certain quantitative research (for instance, [10, 14, 15, 17]; yet, a great portion of literature on university problems and their solutions do not have quantitative foundations, mostly because such systems involve qualitative (human) elements that are difficult to quantify and model. The link between the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of the problem is important and therefore deserves more research. A possible approach, in order to model and explore this link, is System Dynamics modeling/simulation methodology which employs a set of techniques that allows quantitative and realistic representation of variables that are typically perceived to be qualitative. This study intends to construct a simulation model, a computerized platform, on which a range of problems concerning a university administration system can be analyzed and certain policies for overcoming these problems can be tested and compared. In particular, the model focuses on those university problems that are dynamic and persistent in nature and as such must be addressed by high level, strategic policymaking mechanisms within the university. These strategic policy making mechanisms are typically the president, the deans, and the major policy-making councils at the university and divisional levels. The final goal of the research is constructing an interactive gaming version of the simulation model that can be played by such policy makers. II. R E S E A R C H M E T H O D O L O G Y The tool used to analyze the problem and build the model, is System Dynamics methodology. System Dynamics methodology was introduced in 1960s by a group of scientists at Sloan School of Management at MIT [7, 13]. At the beginning, it was applied to industrial systems. During 1970s and 1980s it has become extremely popular and has been applied to a wide range of systems, including ecological, economic, sociological and even psychological systems. System Dynamics methodology typically consists of the following steps: (1) problem description, (2) model conceptualization, (3) model construction (simulation model), (4) verification and validation of the model, (5) simulation experiments. Once the System Dynamics model is complete, it can be converted into an interactive simulation game. The two aspects of designing an interactive simulation are i) proper selection of interactive decision variables and modification of the simulation model accordingly, ii) programming of the interactive user interface ("screen design"). Issues involved in these two aspects, conceptual and technical difficulties, design principles, etc. have been discussed in literature, (See, for instance, [ 1, 8, 11,