Is It Legal? Gamifying Business Law Courses

• At Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, a business law simulation turns students into trainees at a fictional organization that supplies legal advice to business entrepreneurs.
• As scenarios within the simulation present progressively more complex legal situations, students must turn to authentic business and government websites to determine how to answer clients’ inquiries, creating a serious game.
• Each time students complete learning activities, they unlock rewards designed to encourage study and help them develop their professional skills.

 
I have a bold opinion about a commonly required component of the business school curriculum. Any course named Business Law is a furphy—an Australian word that means something particularly absurd. A better name would be Intro to Business Law, and here’s why.

Law students spend three intense years learning to think like lawyers. But business students are expected to master the concepts of business law in one 12-week course. Few of them have prior knowledge of legal and political procedures—and, moreover, international students usually are accustomed to entirely different political and legal systems.

This means that professors attempting to teach introductory business law courses (which is what they should be named) must start at the very beginning. What is law? What are the differences between civil versus common law systems? How are laws made? What is the parliamentary legislative process? What is meant by phrases such as “parliamentary sovereignty” and “the doctrine of precedence”?

Unfortunately, a course that commences by working its way through the history of law is boring, complex, and disconnected from relatable business contexts. Such an approach risks alienating students who cannot see how these topics are relevant to their chosen profession. Many of them stop preparing for classes, which results in poor attendance rates, badly written assignments, frequent academic integrity issues, low student evaluation scores, increasing teacher dissatisfaction, and high fail rates.

My suggestion is that introductory business law courses should not attempt to cover the great breadth of the law or require students to read weighty legal texts. Instead, such business law courses should do a better job of helping students understand the resources they can draw on any time they need to understand points of business law. Courses also should be made challenging and engaging. Schools can meet both these goals by gamifying course content with simulations powered by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

The Game of Business

At Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Australia, we are launching a new Bachelor of Commerce degree that provides an opportunity to reimagine the way we teach business law. The structure of the new course is inspired by RMIT’s active, applied, and authentic (AAA) pedagogy. What makes it different is that it’s built around a multilevel, mastery-based simulation.

Students are initially “onboarded” to the course as trainee employees at BizRight, a fictional statutory body that provides legal information to members of the business community who contact BizRight with questions. As the game progresses, students must comprehend more complex content so they can answer realistic and increasingly difficult business inquiries about legal matters.

To begin the simulation, students first meet their managers—GenAI-powered digital humans who reappear throughout the course. During the 12 weeks of the semester, students are rotated through a training program that covers a different aspect of business law each week. To facilitate deeper learning, the unrelatable legal history of the traditional introductory class is incorporated into the substantive content as the course unfolds.

Throughout the simulation, student “trainees” undertake specific tasks such as drafting emails to clients, generating checklists for training, designing infographic posters, and creating mindmaps to help them organize ideas. Each of these tasks is a learning activity (LA) that aligns with weekly goals for the course’s learning outcomes. These situationally realistic, interactive LAs are embedded in the school’s learning management system (LMS) and students must complete specific LAs before attending each class.

LAs and other assessment tasks provide professors with opportunities to conduct authentic assessments. For example, for one assessment task, students learn that, because of the diligence they’ve displayed, their managers want them to take on advanced tasks such as drafting memos on specific topics. As students engage with each LA, the holistic simulation vehicle becomes a serious game that provides them with practical industry experience.

The class is run on a flipped and blended learning model delivered through the LMS. Students gain deeper insights into the course content by completing assigned readings and watching asynchronous 60-minute faculty lectures that are chunked into three 20-minute videos. These readings and videos are designed to help students complete their LAs.

In addition, students are required to attend weekly face-to-face tutorial sessions, which allow professors to unpack what students have learned. These sessions are buttressed by weekly post-tutorial summary activities conducted through the LMS. These include formative assessment activities—such as checklists and ungraded quizzes—and reflective tasks that students can complete at their own pace.

A Closer Look

The course relies on three case studies in which GenAI-powered digital humans present legal queries to the students acting as trainee representatives of BizRight. Students are provided with curated hyperlinks to authentic resources, including the Australian Tax Office, IP Australia, and official Australian government websites that offer business assistance.

As students consult up-to-date legitimate resources, they learn about real-world business regulatory frameworks and processes. And as they conduct the research necessary to answer their clients’ queries, they find that the academic curriculum comes to life in the contemporary Australian business context. At their weekly tutorials—which are branded as BizRight team meetings—students share and discuss the work products they’ve generated through these LAs.

Over the course of the simulation, students must respond to clients’ inquiries at increasing levels of mastery: foundational, developing, and competent. This “chunking” of content scaffolds students’ learning experiences in accordance with Vygotsty’s Zone of Proximal Development theory, which holds that learners can be guided toward mastering subjects that are just beyond their ability. In addition, this differentiating of content follows Bloom’s taxonomy of learning process, in which students learn in a structured, sequential manner.

Students master foundational content through the first client, Daisy’s Milk, a solo trader looking to launch a startup. They enhance their developing skills by answering queries for OnTime Consulting, a proposed business partnership. And they gain competent legal skills as they assist the Australia-based Cybertech Corporation, which wants to sell software and technology goods globally via the internet.

Let’s take a closer look at a couple of these cases. In the OnTime Consulting scenario, students receive an email from Jamilah and Pete, two friends who want to provide consultancy services via a partnership to Victoria and the wider Australian market. Jamilah and Pete outline their goals and add, “We are seeking your legal information and guidance to ensure that we structure the partnership properly. What are the steps we should take? What legal considerations should we be aware of before moving forward?”

BizRight trainees are advised to first consult the appropriate chapter in Business Law, which they can find on the reading list within the LMS, and specifically seek out what parliament legislated in the Partnership Act. In addition, they’re directed to look for draft partnership agreements that split risks and benefits equally. After students have familiarized themselves with the pros and cons of business partnerships, they draft responses to Jamilah and Pete and bring these responses to class for feedback.

In the Cybertech case study, students are contacted by Olivia Reach, a GenAI Digital Human who is overstepping her authority as a Cybertech agent to bind the principal to her dealings with a third party. To determine whether Cybertch is bound by the actions of “O.Reach,” students must learn the rules on apparent and implied authority of agents and then apply these laws of agency to the facts. Students are prompted to complete a memo of information for Cybertech, which helps them work thorough the issues raised by Olivia’s conduct.

Hear From Olivia Reach full video

With each scenario and each learning activity, students are encouraged to assess the business’s current situation, reflect on how to apply their knowledge, decide the best course of action, and act on their decisions. They update their knowledge and begin the whole process again as they engage in the next learning activity.

Through repeated practice throughout the course, they develop both their legal analysis abilities and their communication skills. This process of continuous learning mirrors the four-part Experiential Learning Cycle outlined by David Kolb.

The Benefits of Gamification

The BizRight simulation is an excellent example of the gamification of learning. It is designed to engage students and motivate them to complete all three case-study LAs per week and to complete all 12 weeks of the course.

When they finish their three weekly LAs, students post on the LMS discussion board to authenticate their work, which unlocks a weekly award. Once they have made it through all 36 LAs, they unlock the course-level reward—the uber reward! In gamer talk, they have achieved the Boss Level.

In any gamification scenario, it is critically important that the unlockable rewards provide value to individuals, because this activates the dopaminergic reward systems in their brains. Because people are naturally self-interested, personalized unlockable rewards tend to be the most motivating. For instance, players respond well to receiving individualized, unique feedback such as the kind they might get through creative personality tests. They also enjoy gaining access to value-added digital assets such as on-theme TED Talks.

In the educational setting, an appropriate set of rewards might be a series of weekly unlockable assets provided by the career services office. These could include individual reviews of curriculum vitae and cover letters, assistance creating LinkedIn profiles, or advice about getting professional headshots.

In any case, it’s essential that professors avoid choosing rewards that a student might perceive as more work. If you do that as an educator, you will lose the opportunity to encourage students in ways that take advantage of human neurological systems. Worse, you might inadvertently encourage disengagement. In business talk, you’ve turned your asset into a liability.

At RMIT, we have opted to make each unlockable reward some type of assistance in developing employability skills. We are exploring the idea of making the course-level reward an NFT Digital Certificate via blockchain.

But if you’re an educator, you can choose your own adventure. The reward can be whatever the administration agrees to, so get creative. Free academic dress at graduation? Reduced tuition fees? One-on-one mentoring with an industry alumni partner? Coffee with a professor? Even, perhaps, dinner with the dean? Just choose carefully and remember the golden rule of gamification: The reward must be rewarding.

A properly gamified business law course will keep students motivated and engaged. More important, it will teach them what they need to know about an essential aspect of business: where business intersects with the law. Through a simulation, they will absorb knowledge that they will be able to use in real life—and they’ll learn it in a way that that is both entertaining and memorable.