Investigation of virtual teams and serious games

ERPsim is an intensive simulation game housed out of HEC Montreal. It allows students to operate an organization in a real-world enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Most of the research to date using ERPsim in the classroom is with face-to-face teams working together in a lab. With virtual teams being commonplace and most organizations having distributed operations, implementing ERPsim with virtual teams is representative of a real-world situation. How would using virtual teams affect technology acceptance, student satisfaction, and perceived student learning of ERP? This paper investigated the use of ERPsim with virtual teams. Data were collected using a pre- and post-test survey designed to measure technology acceptance, ERP and business process knowledge, and student satisfaction. T-tests were utilized to determine if students' perceptions of learning from the ERPsim were different after the virtual team experience than they were after the face-to-face team experience.