Designing the Top-Rated Business Class at University of Toronto

For its first 12 years, the GettingItDone MBA course relied heavily on student interviews with business professionals. However, when the course was condensed into a 10-day intensive, the instructors needed a new assignment that could be completed in a much tighter time frame. They turned to Marketplace Simulations and saw that business simulations not only fit the new schedule but also increased student learning.

About the GettingItDone Course

The GettingItDone course at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management was designed to give MBA students a practical framework for setting strategy, creating alignment, executing the strategy, and assessing effectiveness. Students learn how to apply management strategy based on the works of Peter Drucker, Bill Reddin, Roger Martin, and Mike Kami.

From the beginning, Dr. John O’Dwyer and his original co-instructor, Brendan Calder, aimed to make the course an active “doing” course, not a passive “memorizing” course. Students usually read the lesson and reflect on it before class. When the class meets, they review the highlights and break out for group evaluation discussions. 

For the first 12 years, a key element of the “doing course” was a case study assignment. Student teams were assigned a company to study. They conducted interviews and learned about how their assigned company applied the management tools discussed in the class. This allowed students to see those tools in action, even if they weren’t currently using them in their own job.

The Challenges: Time and Case Study Limitations

While the case study served as a core element of the course, it also had inherent limitations. Students still didn’t have the opportunity to apply the tools themselves. They experienced the tools vicariously, filtered through the memories and preferences of their interview subjects. 

The students didn’t truly get to experience their companies’ frustrations and victories. They didn’t learn which tools would be the most challenging—or helpful—for them as individuals. They depended on their assigned companies to answer their questions well and had to use their imaginations to determine how the tools would impact their own working lives.

Despite these challenges, the course was beloved and likely would have remained just as it was if not for a second challenge: timing.

The GettingItDone course was originally a 12-week course. However, in 2011, the Rotman School of Management introduced a two-week intensive option. 

Calder and O’Dwyer quickly realized an intensive could provide a much more impactful learning experience. Unfortunately, ten days wasn’t enough time for students to conduct a proper company case study.

The GettingItDone course needed a new core assignment that would allow students to see management strategies in use, up close. 

The Solution: The Integrated Business Management Simulation

O’Dwyer decided to look into business simulations as an alternative to the case studies. In 2014, he discovered the Integrated Business Management simulation by Marketplace Simulations. 

The simulation challenges students to build a business in a global market, taking on challenges in marketing, product development, manufacturing, accounting, finance, quality control, business negotiations, and financial analysis.

O’Dwyer places students on teams of five and has them play the simulation over nine days. For the first few days, they operate in the forming and storming stages of team development. They determine their roles and figure out their decision-making process.

The instructors let teams make plenty of mistakes at this stage.

“We just want to throw them in at the deep end, managing a business from the start, with huge time pressure,” O’Dwyer says.

On Thursday of the first week, students start learning management tools. One of the key tools they receive is a decision-making matrix to help them determine who needs to be involved in each decision. 

As they learn the tools, students enter the stages of norming and performing. Their performance improves, and they get to experience a before-and-after effect within their simulated company.

“The simulation gives our students the scenario to run a business and practice these tools,” O’Dwyer says. “And so, from my point of view, I’ve died and gone to heaven. I got lucky.”

Evaluating Student Performance

O’Dwyer sees the business simulation as less about evaluating his students’ skills and more about giving them the chance to apply the tools they’ve learned in a lifelike environment. For this reason, the simulation originally carried no grade at all. Unfortunately, this gracious grading model downplayed the simulation’s importance to students.

O’Dwyer realized he needed to give the simulation some weight in students’ grades to get their attention. By making the simulation count for just 10 percent of students’ grades, O’Dwyer could count on a healthy sense of competition and dedication.

A Support Team that Works with His Schedule

A ten-day intensive doesn’t leave much time for instructors to catch up on things. During his early years with the simulation, O’Dwyer was especially grateful for Marketplace’s support team, which operates seven days a week. 

O’Dwyer often called in on weekends, asking any questions that had come up during the week. Whatever the issue or question, he could be confident that it would be solved within the hour.

“They were always there, and they’d call you back if you weren’t there,” O’Dwyer says, adding that Marketplace’s support team is “second to none.”

Results: 23 Years and Going Strong

Dr. John O’Dwyer and Kelly Murumets pull from their experience as CEOs to teach practical business leadership in their award-winning University of Toronto class.

Today the GettingItDone course is 23 years old and is still going strong. It is the longest-running elective MBA course and most awarded MBA course at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

O’Dwyer says Marketplace Simulations is an essential part of the course’s award-winning design. It gives every student the opportunity to apply the management tools they’re learning in a realistic business environment.

“They now execute all the tools themselves, … and they have the scars themselves, as they say,” O’Dwyer explains.

The students agree with O’Dwyer’s assessment. For the last two years, they’ve given him and his co-instructor, Kelly Murumets, a standing ovation and rated the class 4.9 out of 5. 

“This is the best-designed course at Rotman and should be the benchmark for every other class,” one student said, echoing many other students who say GettingItDone was the best class of their MBA experience.

“The simulation was outstanding,” another review reads. “I have never seen a simulation at this level. It was truly very special and helpful for learning as a whole.” 

Yet another student gets to the core of the issue, writing, “I would probably spend years making mistakes until I learned all the lessons myself.”

With Marketplace Simulations, business students don’t have to spend years making costly mistakes or learn vicariously through the experiences of others. They get to apply what they’re learning now, make mistakes in a safe environment, and let it shape them for the future. 

For GettingItDone students, that difference has been worth everything.