Sharing Practice – Engaging role-play activities delivered and supported at a distance
This week Louise Williams has generously agreed to share her experience of running engaging virtual role-play activities at a distance. Lou used a clever scenario and a combination of web based resources to create a lively and exciting afternoon that lead to some excellent work being produced by her students.
Read on for more details:
“I decided to run a virtual session (1pm-5pm) with the Level 4 students on the BA (Hons) Sport Business which involved them being in a university library in town and me at I.M.Marsh – the module is a technology module so it made sense to try it! I combined the use of SKYPE, Blackboard (through the discussion board and the blog facility) and the online chat tool “Todays Meet”. The idea behind using these three was to combine a bit of everything – a chat function for quick messages that needed to be sent, a more formal place for them to upload the work they were doing (Blackboard) and then a mechanism so that I could actually see them to check they were engaging in the afternoons tasks (SKYPE). The use of SKYPE was also to enhance the real world learning aspect as they would need to be comfortable using SKYPE calls in the sport business industry (along with other sectors they may go into).
The session was planned in advance so I had near enough typed out a script to use in the build up to the tasks to ensure the session wasn’t stop start whilst I frantically typed away – I could just copy and paste this way. The afternoon consisted of 3 tasks, all of which had a deadline for completion (again, linking to the real world element of meeting tight deadlines in pressured situations). One task was released at a time and the students knew the timings they had to work to. The tasks included writing a print newspaper article on a breaking sports news story; production of a storyboard for a sports TV news story they had just been told (like Sky Sports News) and finally carrying out a live press conference with a new football player who had just signed for Liverpool (or Everton! I am a Blackburn fan so impartial!) for which I acted as a journalist and asked questions via SKYPE during their press conference. The students knew I would SKYPE call them in the press conference but they didn’t know when else I would be SKYPE’ing during the afternoon to check in. They filmed their press conferences and then either uploaded to You Tube to email me the link, or they sent me the video of it.
We used the online chat facility to set up the tasks and for any questions they had and all work completed was uploaded to blackboard (I was actually surprised by the amount and quality of work they produced – I think this was better than what they would have done if they were sat in the classroom doing it!).
The students seemed to really enjoy this and they really did engage with it, more than I thought they would. They didn’t `virtually’ or `actually’ sneak off early, they were involved in this throughout the afternoon and seemed to be more professional in how they dealt with things like the SKYPE calls and they played their roles well as sports journalists.
What I would say is that the session took a lot of advanced preparation to make sure that at any point, I had a backup activity, or alternative methods of communication should anything not work, or that they completed the tasks too quickly or they were taking too long. Not having them in the room didn’t mean I had an easy afternoon with my feet up, quite the opposite, – it was a bit intense, maybe as I hadn’t done anything like this before, but it was a really fun way to deliver the session.”
For those of you especially interested in the technology used, more information and previous coverage of TodaysMeet is available here alongside Blogs and Discussion Boards here. Whilst information on other faculty projects that have also drawn on Skype to support distance learning can be found here and here.
If you want to learn more about Lou’s approach feel free to contact her or perhaps offer to buy her a coffee next time you see her.
Created by Louise Williams and Chris Gillies
Cc – image attribution – IMG 9900 by kelth.bellvay