Alternate Reality Courses

Learning business skills like leadership and strategic thinking has never been more important. The Wharton School, America’s oldest and best-known business school, has developed a new way to gain these critical skills: Alternate Reality Courses

Combining aspects of classroom teaching, simulations, and games, Alternate Reality Courses are a new way to learn the business skills taught to Wharton MBA students. Alternate Reality Courses were invented by Wharton Interactive to solve some of the problems of conventional teaching and learning.

When we try to learn something new, quite often we aren’t:

• Paying attention; if we don’t focus, we don’t learn.
• Challenged appropriately; if the challenge is too easy, we lose interest; if the challenge is too hard, we might give up.
• Given a chance to practice; if we only learn theory and don’t put that theory into practice, we soon forget the theory.
• Making connections; if we don’t make connections between concepts or between experiences, new ideas won’t take root.
• Getting personalized feedback; if we don’t know what we did wrong or how to fix it for next time, we are likely to make the same mistake again.

Alternate Reality Courses are designed to solve these problems

In an Alternate Reality Course, learners live through an experience, such as running a startup company, and make decisions just as they would in real life. The game reacts to their choices, allowing learners to practice and build skills that will transfer from the simulation to the real world.

An Alternate Reality Course will:

• Focus your attention; they are designed as interactive stories in which you have a starring role and make key decisions, decisions that change the course of events. You’ll have control of the story.
• Meet you at your level; every course is built to support learners at every stage of learning; players get help when they need it and additional challenges when they are up for it. You’ll be challenged but not frustrated.
• Cut through the theory-practice gap; the courses are designed to teach both theory and practice and built so that players learn by doing. You’ll get to practice the skills you learn.
• Give you personalized feedback every step of the way; the courses are built to react to your choices, and you’ll get feedback about those choices. That feedback will help you learn from your mistakes so that you’ll get it right in real life.

Alternate Reality Courses are simulations built from the ground up to combine world-class subject matter expertise, interactive fiction, the science of learning, and innovative game design. And they are open to all.

When you take an Alternate Reality Course, you experience the world's best teachers, the engagement of games, the immersive reality of interactive fiction, and the latest mental tricks to help you learn.

Come learn about our Alternate Reality Courses by trying one out, for free, and explore the other courses and simulations available from Wharton Interactive.