Enhancing Student Professionalization Through Business Simulation Games

Background

The United Nations addressed that education needs to encourage intercultural dialogue and sustainable development after the second world war (Dale and Robertson, 2014). The United Nations General Assembly asserted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris on 10 December 1948. Article 26 mentioned that ‘Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Since the United Nations announced Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights on 16 December 1996, the right to education was officially identified worldwide (United Nations, 2016). To a certain extent, education may reinforce national economic competitiveness by producing human capital (Lau, Ng, Tam & Chan, 2018; Fawns, Mulherin, Hounsell & Aitken, 2021).

Hong Kong’s higher education system has been wholly based on the English model since the first Opium War (1839-1842). To a certain extent, Hong Kong higher education has performed tremendous growth and significant transformation in the past 180 years. Since the 1980s, Hong Kong has undergone two primary waves of educational reforms. The first was inclined toward enhancing internal effectiveness, like teaching and learning in schools, while the second mainly focused on increasing interface effectiveness, like quality, market competitiveness, and accountability. A series of educational reforms led Hong Kong has experienced a paradigm shift from a local to a global basis (Cheng, 2009). In general, the traditional classroom approach is mainly adopted by Hong Kong higher education institutions. Nevertheless, the conventional classroom method concentrates on theoretical knowledge transition, and teacher-centric learning usually addresses spoon-feeding education. That is the process of directly telling students what they need to know and, thus, requires little independent thought on their part. As such, it demotivates students’ learning and fails to fulfil employers’ expectations. Now, most of Hong Kong’s higher education institutions strive toward ranking on league tables (e.g., QS and Times Higher Education). Graduates’ employability, teaching pedagogy, and learning context are one of the key performance indicators affecting the ranking. Also, several of Hong Kong’s higher education institutions prefer to obtain internationally renowned accreditations (e.g., AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA) to boost the number of student enrolment and improve their reputation in the academic world. Innovative teaching pedagogy is one of the evaluation items by such international accreditation bodies. To a certain extent, a business simulation game is one of the essential vehicles to sustain the Hong Kong higher education institutions’ competitive position. In the dynamic business environment, most business firms and government bodies desire to recruit preferable graduates to perform high levels of professionalisation. In response, higher education institutions are increasingly striving to create innovative learning contexts and improve existing learning pedagogies (Lau and Ng, 2015; Lau et al., 2018). From an educational viewpoint, business simulation games are vital learning and motivational tools, an interconnection between practical problems and abstract concepts, ‘hands-on’ and ‘learning by doing’ method of learning. Based on a technical viewpoint, business simulation games provide education’s long-last solution to support collaborative and online learning (Ben-Zvi, 2010). Educators incline toward working with advanced technology to produce more considerable learning experiences. Thus, investigating innovative methods for technology-friendly business simulation games for learning and teaching is specifically sensible (Tang, Chen, Law, Wu, Lau, Guan, He & Ho, 2021).