Personal Simulations: let each learner bring their own challenge

A Personal Simulation is an activity where the learner brings the scenario. Instead of practising the situation you wrote, each learner describes a situation of their own — a difficult conversation with a particular colleague, a negotiation they have coming up, a class they are dreading — and Professor Cesura builds them a role-play for it on the spot. They then practise it and get the same feedback report every other simulation produces.

One activity therefore produces a different simulation for every learner who opens it, and a different one again each time the same learner starts it.

💡 In the platform it is called a Personal Simulation when you add it to a space. In billing it appears as the Personal challenges pool. They are the same thing.

When to use it

It fits where a fixed scenario would be too narrow:

Management and leadership programmes — everyone has a different difficult report.
Onboarding a cohort with different roles — the skill is shared, the situation is not.
Bring-your-own-case workshops — the learner practises the conversation they are actually facing this week.
A follow-up to a taught simulation — first they practise your case, then their own.

It fits badly where everyone must face the same situation: assessment, certification, or any comparison between learners. Their simulations will not be alike, so their scores are not comparable.

What you need to create one

An organization account. Personal Simulations are an organization feature. On a personal account the entry stays in the menu, greyed out, with the line “Personal challenges are available on organization plans.”
Permission to add content to the space. Anyone who may add a simulation or a content activity may add a Personal Simulation — instructors included, not only space owners.

Create one

In your space, open the Add menu and choose Personal Simulation (“Each learner defines a practice challenge”). The activity is created immediately as New personal simulation and its editor opens. There is no template to pick — that is the point.

General

The usual activity settings: whether the activity is active, its language and its preview image. How participants get in (public, or with an access code) is on the Link tab.

Activity Steps

One timeline for the whole activity, with the two challenge steps — Building the simulation and Running the simulation — fixed in the middle: steps above them run before the challenge, steps below run after the practice conversation. The editor opens on this tab.

Professor Cesura's opening message sits in the Building the simulation step: the learner reads it word for word as the chat's first turn. New challenges are seeded with a ready default in the activity's language, and you edit it with the rich text editor. This is the single most important field in the activity. It is where you tell the learner what kind of situation to bring, and how much detail to give. Leave it vague and you will get vague scenarios.

Before the challenge: whatever the learner should read, watch or answer before they describe their challenge: an explanation of the exercise, a video, a model, a pre-questionnaire, a consent form. These behave like the intro steps of any activity, and they run before anything is generated — so a learner who abandons the activity here has cost nothing.

After the practice conversation: four report stages are always present and cannot be removed:

Start — the landing screen of the report.
Feedback — the generated feedback report.
Evaluator Chat — the feedback chat about that feedback.
End — the wrap-up, with the PDF download.

You can add your own steps between them — a reflection form, a follow-up questionnaire — and drag them into place. Start stays first and End stays last.

Link and Embedding

The same sharing surfaces as any other activity: a direct link and QR code, or an embed snippet for a web page or an LMS. Anonymous participants can open a Personal Simulation from a shared link; they are asked for their name first, the same as anywhere else.

What the learner does

They open the activity and, if they arrived from a shared link, give their name.
They work through the intro steps, if you added any.
They describe their challenge. Professor Cesura opens with your opening message, shown word for word as its first message, and the learner types into a box labelled Your challenge. This is a conversation, not a form: Cesura asks follow-up questions, and the learner can refine the situation until it matches what they actually face. To share background, such as a case summary or an email thread, they can click the paperclip (Upload document) and attach a PDF, Word (DOCX), or text file up to 10 MB. Cesura adds the document’s text to the conversation; images and formatting are not read. If the upload fails, they see “The document could not be attached. Try again, or paste its text into the chat.”
They press Start. The simulation is generated — “Generating your simulation… This can take 10–30 seconds.”
They practise, in the ordinary simulation runner, against a character built from their own description.
They get their report, with feedback, the feedback chat and the PDF.

A Personal Simulation cannot be resumed

Each press of Start mints a new simulation and a new run. A learner who leaves halfway through and comes back does not return to where they were — they start again, describe a challenge again, and get a fresh scenario. Say so in your instructions if it matters: this is a sit-down-and-finish activity.

The report shows how the scenario was built

A Personal Simulation’s report carries an extra tab, Scenario Build — “How this scenario was built” — holding the learner’s own challenge description and their conversation with Professor Cesura. Without it, neither the learner nor you could tell afterwards what the simulation was supposed to be about. It sits next to the transcript, so “what was built” reads beside “what was practised”.

What it costs

A Personal Simulation costs 2 credits, charged once, covering both halves: Professor Cesura building the scenario and the learner running it. It is charged to the organization that owns the space — never to the learner.

Two details worth knowing:

A failed generation costs nothing. The balance is checked before anything is generated, so an empty pool refuses the activity up front rather than spending model time; and if the generation itself fails, nothing is charged.
It is not free, even though most authoring is. Testing runs and Professor Cesura builds are free on organization plans, but a Personal Simulation runs a fresh generation for every learner on every attempt, so it keeps its price. It is also the heaviest single item in fair-use terms, at 6 units per attempt — a class of thirty starting one at once is a real amount of work.

See Credits & billing.

Results and privacy

Results appear in the space report like any other activity: who took it, their feedback, their transcript. What differs is that each learner practised a different scenario, so read the results as individual practice rather than as a comparison. Open a run’s Scenario Build tab to see what that particular learner was working on.

The generated simulation belongs to the run, not to your library. It is never added to the Library, the learner never sees a template, and nobody else can open it. Deleting the activity cleans up the simulations its runs generated.

Writing a good opening message

The quality of the exercise is decided almost entirely by this one field. What works:

Name the kind of situation. “A conversation with a team member whose performance has dropped” beats “a difficult conversation”.
Ask for the specifics that make a character. Who is the other person, what is their role, what happened, what do you want out of the conversation?
Set the scope. One conversation, not a whole project.
Say what not to include if the subject is sensitive — real names, patient details, anything they would not want in a report they may share. This applies to attached documents too.