Reusability of Online Role Play as Learning Objects or Learning Designs

Introduction

It is not yet clear whether the learning designs movement will take off with the same momentum as the learning objects industry. This chapter compares the two by focusing on online role play as the example of courseware. Role play is deliberately chosen because it is a learning design that does not have its pedagogical basis in a content transmission model of teaching. Instead it presents a constructivist learning environment, and as such it may better challenge the current conceptualisation of learning objects. By discussing learning objects and reusability in the concrete teaching and learning context of online role play, it is anticipated that recommendations might be more meaningful to teachers than theoretical papers on computer science aspects of learning objects.

This chapter describes a study conducted by the authors which tracked the uptake of online role play in Australian higher education from 1990 to 2006 and investigated the affordances to uptake. Our use of the word “uptake” overlaps with other terms like “reuse,” “adoption,” “adaptation,” “modification,” and “dissemination” (McKenzie, Alexander, Harper, & Anderson, 2005). Online role play is an area of teaching activity in Australian universities that is small enough that it can be investigated in detail via interview and case study rather than broad-brush survey methods. This case study approach to research provides richer and more appropriate detailed data as well as information on individual differences which could be lost in surveys.

The study treats “reuse” in two ways: reuse of an existing online role play and reuse of an online role play as the model for another role play. In the context of this book, the first type of reuse implies the online role play is used as a learning object and the second type implies the online role play derives from a learning design.

It is usually assumed that learning objects are small, having a low level of granularity that means they are easy to reuse and easy to customise to individual needs. However it is also possible to aggregate learning objects into a larger learning object (Duncan, 2003) such as a whole online role play. Whether larger learning objects hinder reuse is an interesting question but it was not one specifically addressed by this study, which focused instead on university teachers who have chosen to reuse rather than looking at why teachers chose not to reuse. The second question on obstacles to uptake has been covered by other studies (McKenzie et al., 2005; McNaught, 2003).