Personalised Role Playing Simulations

Abstract

This research explores the use of personalised role playing simulations to encourage active student engagement in the learning process. Personalised role playing simulations could provide educators with an alternative teaching methodology, and students with course content tailored to their needs. The personalisation of student learning resources could be based on: level of achievement; prior experience; learning preferences; relevance of learning resources to individual students? requirements; and lecturers or students choice of direction through the units of learning provided. Some of the advantages of using personalised role playing simulations include: inexpensive to produce; easy to create; re-usable; not life threatening; engaging; and interesting. Research to date has shown that the main obstacles to developing authoring tools for creating personalised role playing simulations for use by non-technical authors are: the amount of technical assistance required; the cost of production; the substantial time commitment involved; and the complexity of design necessary to ensure the expected learning outcomes are achieved and pedagogical requirements are met. The criteria to be used to effectively evaluate authoring tools for creating personalised role playing simulations could include: user?s acceptance; educators pedagogical considerations have been met; the authoring tool is robust; usability of the authoring tools satisfies the human computer interface expectations of potential authors; the simulations produced are effective; efficient production of simulations can be achieved; initial training required is substantial enough to enable educators to create simulations on their own. While research has shown that the concept of personalised role playing simulations would enhance the effectiveness of existing learning management systems by improving student engagement and understanding, the obstacles to realisation have yet to be overcome (Brusilovsky, 2004; Foss & Cristea, 2009).