What is Online Role Play

This study tracks the uptake of online role play in Australia from 1990 to 2006 and the affordances to its uptake. It examines reusability, as one affordance to uptake, from the perspective of two often polarized constructs: learning object and learning design. 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. The first type of reuse implies the online role play is a learning object and the second type implies the online role play derives from a learning design. Online role play consists of a scenario and a set of roles that students adopt in order to collaboratively solve a problem, create something, or explore an issue via e-mail or a combination of e-mail and Web-based threaded discussion forum. Thirty-six role plays of this type were identified in Australian universities of which 80% were reuse of a learning design. Only three examples of role play as a learning object were found, suggesting that learning design is a useful concept for understanding how to support reusability in universities. Other affordances to uptake of role play were also tracked. This indicated that the contribution of educational developers far outweighed that of academic colleagues, conferences, journals, and engines. The results have implications for the work practices of educational developers and for managers of learning object repositories.