Simulations have been widely used in crisis and emergency communication for practitioners but have not reached classrooms in higher education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects that simulations using social media have on the learning of crisis communication among college students. To explore the effects, a real-time crisis simulation activity using social media is created for 132 undergraduate students enrolled at a business school. Both quantitative and qualitative data collected from pre- and post-simulation surveys are used to investigate the benefits of simulations on learning and identify the challenges the participants experienced. [For full proceedings, see ED571459.]