Teaching Tip: Using role-play at UAF

May 13, 2014

Marissa Carl

Everyone knows The Professor, the character Roy Hinkley played by the late Russell Johnson in the television show Gilligan's Island.
Everyone knows The Professor, the character Roy Hinkley played by the late Russell Johnson in the television show Gilligan's Island.


Explicit role-play has a rich history in education. Law students use mock trials to hone their craft, counselors role-play client contact sessions, and many disciplines require students to give presentations or perform project work while acting in the role of the professional they hope to become. In fact, the dialectical method of Socrates is a form of role-play, wherein participants adopt an aspect for an argument not necessarily their own.

This past semester, UAF eLearning had the opportunity to experiment with designing explicit role-play directly into the fabric of a course. Rob Prince, also a UAF CITE Fellow, worked with instructional designers to improve student engagement in his online Journalism 101 course, Media and Society. Together, we designed the student experience around a central narrative that included several gamified mechanics, including role-play.

On the first day of class, students were welcomed to the Haveman Media Corp. as interns. They were informed that the corporation was foundering and in need of fresh ideas if it was to survive. As students completed “human resource assessments” (quizzes) and turned in their reports and analyses, they gained points, rising in rank from mailroom clerk to executive editor, determining the future of the company along the way.

Read more about Prince’s class and role-play in the education at iTeachU: http://elearning.uaf.edu/go/tt-powerofplay3.

-- Teaching Tip by Owen Guthrie, UAF eLearning instructional designer

This is part three of the three-part series on the power of play.

Read part one: http://elearning.uaf.edu/go/tt-powerofplay

Read part two: http://elearning.uaf.edu/go/tt-powerofplay2