How to Utilize Student Input in Crisis Management Education.

The focus on planning for managing potential crisis has increased during the past years. The incidents that one experiences in different countries and in our own country has led to regulations that instruct companies and organizations to develop and train on plans for emergencies and crisis. These regulations and the organizations realization of a need to have plans to handle potential crisis and train for handling situations, have created a demand for educational initiatives to aid the process back in their organizations. As a respond to this, The Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences has developed a bachelor study in Crisis Preparedness and Crisis Management. The target group has been wide and include all organizations; private and governmental. The students attending range from first responders to office workers, what they have in common is the organizational need of learning more about the curriculum that is offered in the Bachelor degree (such as e.g. Crisis Communication). This paper will present a way of getting the students to utilize their own and others backgrounds and experiences into the learning situation. The students are given a mandatory assignment of planning, execute and evaluate an exercise. This includes constructing a scenario for handling a form of crisis or rescue operation. These scenarios are programmed in a gaming platform (VBS3, HoloLens or RAYVN), and then played like a simulation. In order for the scenarios to be playable, it requires a quite intensive and extensive collaboration and cooperation between the group members. Our early attempts (with two groups) on this was so successful that we now expand to eight groups. The paper thus also present results from a survey, interviews (group interviews and individual interviews), and observations, both from the development phase and the simulation phase. Our main goal is to investigate on how the students perceive this approach in order to support their learning outcome from the study and how they see this to be useful and relevant for their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]