The Challenge or Opportunity
Event management education presents a fundamental tension: the skills that matter most in professional practice – rapid decision making under pressure, cross-team communication, crisis response, and empathy – are difficult to develop in a conventional classroom. Reading about crowd management or writing a risk assessment does not replicate the cognitive and emotional demands of being in a live operational environment.
Dr Claire Drakeley, Senior Lecturer in Events Management, identified an opportunity to address this through simulation pedagogy: creating a structured, scaffolded experience that replicates the conditions of a real event without the consequences of real failure. The first iteration of Operation Nexus demonstrated appetite and impact; Operation Nexus Plus was designed to go further, embedding professional technology, expanding cross-disciplinary participation, and beginning to document and systematise the approach.
Crucially, the simulation remained optional and extracurricular, ensuring that participation was self-selecting and that engagement was genuinely motivated. Forty students signed up voluntarily across multiple disciplines, which in itself speaks to the appeal of this kind of experiential offer.
What Was Done: The Simulation Step by Step
The simulation was structured like the delivery of a real event, drawing on professional event management methodology:
- Registration and commitment: Students signed up via an online form, establishing the first point of engagement and signalling voluntary commitment to the project. This openness meant students worked alongside peers from other disciplines they had never met.
- Preparation and storyboarding: The academic team developed a detailed storyboard – effectively a production schedule – mapping key incidents across the simulation timeline. In the second year, this was refined to identify six to eight structured trigger events at set intervals, giving the simulation a clear spine while retaining flexibility for the team to respond in real time.
- Training in advance: Learning from the first iteration, the team introduced pre-simulation familiarisation with the technology. Students who had not engaged with the tools beforehand found the live day significantly more demanding.
- Live simulation day: Students took on distinct functional roles – event operations, marketing and communications, criminal investigation, hotel management, and museum liaison – mirroring the operational structure of a real major event. All teams communicated through the Halo event management platform and via two-way radio, with the marketing team generating live social media content in response to unfolding incidents.
- Debrief and reflection: Post-simulation reflection formed part of the learning arc, with feedback gathered through focus groups and evaluation. Future iterations plan to link this more formally to assessment opportunities within relevant modules.
Digital Tools Used
Technology was not the centrepiece of Operation Nexus Plus, but it was, as Dr Drakeley put it, the thing that fuelled it. Without it, the simulation could not have achieved the scale, realism, or operational integrity that made it educationally valuable.
Halo — Professional Event Control Software
Halo is the same event management platform used operationally by Silverstone. Its inclusion gave students access to industry-standard technology, enabling them to log communications, track incidents, and manage information flows exactly as they would in a professional environment. Halo also functions as the legal documentation record for an event’s operational decisions, adding an authentic layer of accountability to the experience. The platform was set up using a bespoke environment that replicated Silverstone’s layout without using live Silverstone data, ensuring data governance was maintained. Halo was central to enabling communication across teams operating in different locations simultaneously – something that would have been impossible to manage without a shared digital infrastructure.
Two-Way Radio
The use of radios may seem low-tech by comparison, but it was one of the most impactful elements of the simulation. Students were required to manage multiple, concurrent information streams through headsets: knowing when to listen, when to speak, and how to communicate clearly and efficiently under pressure. This physical engagement with technology created physiological stress responses that were directly relevant to the learning objectives around decision making and communication. For many students, it was the first time they had used this kind of equipment; for events and hospitality students in particular, radio communication is a standard professional skill that had not previously featured in their curriculum.
Padlet and Social Media Management
The marketing and digital communications team used Padlet as a content staging and collaboration tool, simulating live social media content feeds in response to the unfolding crisis scenario. This required significantly higher levels of digital skill and creative agility than other roles within the simulation, as students were generating authentic-looking brand content in real time, responding to information coming in through Halo and radio.
Microsoft Teams
Teams channels were used both in the planning phase – as a shared space for the academic and partner team to manage documentation, the storyboard, and event management plan – and by student groups during the simulation itself for within-team communication and problem solving.
AI Simulation — Fail Safe (In Development)
Running in parallel with the live simulation work, Dr Drakeley is developing Fail Safe: an AI-driven, five-stage online simulation based on the same operational scenario as Nexus Plus (grounded in the Brixton Academy crowd crush). Fail Safe mirrors the pedagogical structure of the live simulation – diagnostic, risk identification, bounded decision making, a tabletop exercise, and an immersive AI-driven scenario – but delivers it asynchronously, with AI personas responding to student decisions through a radio-based interface designed for use with a VR headset. This represents a significant extension of the model: where Nexus Plus requires physical presence at Silverstone, Fail Safe aims to replicate the cognitive and emotional experience of the simulation in a scalable, accessible, online format.
Impact on Teaching and Learning
Student feedback from focus groups and evaluation pointed to measurable impact across several dimensions:
- Decision making: Students reported improved confidence in making rapid decisions with incomplete information, a core professional skill that conventional assessments rarely test.
- Communication: Managing information across Halo, radio, and within-team channels required students to develop clear, purposeful communication habits under pressure.
- Confidence and professional identity: Engagement with Halo in particular gave students a sense of professional experience they felt able to articulate in interviews and on their CVs, beyond the technical functionality of the software.
- Interdisciplinary working: Students from different courses had to figure out, in real time, how to communicate with colleagues they had never met, how to share information across functions, and how their decisions affected others. This was described as a qualitatively different form of teamwork from module-based group work.
- Inclusion and accessibility: The simulation proved particularly effective for neurodiverse students, for whom the experiential, embodied format enabled a form of understanding that written assessments had not. One student who participated both years reported that the simulation made sense of prior module content around risk management and event planning in a way that the classroom had not. The immersive format also allowed academics to stretch individual students in ways that are harder to do in formal teaching settings.
Ethical and Practical Considerations
Managing Stress and Wellbeing
A deliberate design principle of the simulation is to create what Dr Drakeley describes as healthy stress: challenge pitched at the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson alertness curve, where engagement and performance are optimal, without tipping into anxiety that undermines learning. This requires careful calibration. The simulation is framed explicitly as a safe-to-fail environment: students are reminded that no-one will be prosecuted, no-one will lose anything, and mistakes are part of the learning. The same ethical framing applies to staff.
Data Governance
The Halo environment used in the simulation was built on a bespoke instance that used Silverstone’s venue map but contained no Silverstone operational data. Silverstone staff had no access to student activity within the simulation, and student data was not accessible to the partner organisation. This distinction was communicated clearly to all participants.
Welfare Infrastructure
Consistent with research findings from Dr Drakeley’s PhD on event decision making, the team prioritised practical welfare provision: transport, food and drink, warm and dry environments. These are not incidental logistics; they are conditions that enable good decision making and sustained engagement.
Access and Optionality
The simulation remains optional. This is a considered position. For international students in particular, managing radio communications in a second language at pace is a significant ask. Compulsion risks creating an exclusionary experience. Voluntary participation also means those in the room are there because they want to be, which shapes the quality of engagement for everyone. Dr Drakeley notes, however, that the simulation could be offered as an optional assessment pathway within relevant modules for students who choose to participate.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- Underestimating preparation time: The simulation requires substantially more staff time than any formal budget process is likely to allocate. Having now run it twice, the team is better placed to specify accurately what is needed and to advocate for appropriate recognition of hours, including for team members who contributed but were not in the original budget.
- Insufficient pre-simulation training: Students who had not engaged with Halo or radio before the live day were disadvantaged. Familiarisation in advance is not optional; it is a condition of meaningful participation.
- Communication overload for new participants: The volume of communications during planning and delivery can feel overwhelming for those new to simulation design. Being explicit about what each team member needs to know – rather than sharing everything with everyone – is an area for development.
- Treating the storyboard as fixed: The storyboard is a spine, not a script. Agility and responsiveness are inherent to event management, and the simulation should reflect this. Having identified trigger incidents at regular intervals helps to maintain the structure while preserving room for real-time adaptation.
- Technology as spectacle rather than tool: Investment in simulation technology (VR suites, bespoke software, immersive environments) can become an end in itself. The question that matters is not what the technology looks like, but what students do with it and what they learn from it.
Best Suited For
Level 5 and above. Students need a baseline of subject knowledge to engage productively with the scenario; Level 4 students, particularly those who signed up in December of their first semester, may not yet have that foundation. Beyond level, the simulation has demonstrated that subject area and year group are less significant than motivation: the more varied the cohort, the richer the interdisciplinary experience.
The model has potential across any discipline where professional practice involves working under pressure, communicating across teams, and making decisions with incomplete information. It is particularly suited to programmes in events, hospitality, sport, marketing, policing, and emergency services, but the underlying pedagogy is transferable.
What Next
- Operation Nexus Plus is confirmed to run again in the next academic year, with dates to be agreed with Silverstone. Planning will begin earlier to allow deeper partner involvement, particularly from the Hilton and the museum.
- The criminal justice and policing strand will be restructured so that the investigation phase takes place in the weeks following the live day, rather than in real time, enabling richer engagement with the legal and procedural elements of the scenario.
- The team is pursuing ESRC seed funding for a scoping study that will develop the typology, terminology, and best-practice framework for simulation pedagogy in business and law contexts, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Hull and potentially Leeds Beckett University.
- Fail Safe, the AI-driven simulation, is entering testing and will be shared with the wider team once the first demos are available.
- The SIMSIG – a cross-institutional Special Interest Group for simulation pedagogy – is being established under the Centre for Active Digital Education (CADE) to bring together internal colleagues and external partners, share practice, and coordinate research and funding applications.
“The tech is not front and centre of Operation Nexus – and yet it is the thing that fuels it. Without it, we couldn’t raise the issues, we couldn’t create that feeling of scale. It’s a necessary and sufficient condition for making this work. Quite simply, without it, it wouldn’t.”
– Dr Claire Drakeley, Senior Lecturer in Events Management
