Transcript of Conversations with Nola Campbell, Elizabeth McPherson

I'm Elizabeth McPherson from Canberra Institute of Technology and today I'm going to talk to Nola Campbell who, many of you know from her many interactions with the Flexible Learning Leaders in Australia since the year 2000. Nola is here in Canberra at the moment, at the ODLAA Conference, and she gave a very interesting paper yesterday on using role-plays to stimulate reflective online discussion participation. Welcome Nola.

Nola: Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. The concept of role-plays is something that I came up with earlier this year because I wanted to stimulate more in-depth discussion in a second year teacher education class. Some of them had got themselves into a little bit of a rut and had assumed roles that they were having some difficulty getting out of, so I decided that role playing was one way I could make some changes.

Elizabeth: That sounds very interesting. How do you decide on the roles, Nola?

Nola: Well, The role playing discussion takes place in the 7th of 8 discussions, so in the 6 preceding discussions I'm watching very carefully the way people interact. So I'm looking for people who, have a lot to say on day 1 and 2 and never return again, or people who might have lots to say in the last couple of days because they've just remembered this is part of the assessment. So I'm looking at their online behaviour, and I'm trying to create roles that are as different to their normal role as possible … because I want to give them a good jolt.

Elizabeth: mm… yes, I like the sound of that.

Nola: So I produce a list of roles, and I have cute little pictures that go with each role and everybody sees the list of roles and within their group of about 12 people, they know that someone is in one of those roles but the only person they know is themselves. So in their private portfolio area I say, "Elizabeth, your role in discussion topic 7 is going to be 'eternal optimist' ". Now I might have chosen that role for you because you haven't in the past always been very optimistic. So I'm going to make you optimistic, so you know when discussion topic 7 comes around, that's the role you have to fulfil and I have given really clear guidelines about how you're going to do this. You're going to be bright and sunny and cheerful all the time.

Elizabeth: mmm….yes, I like the sound of that. So how many people are there in each group?

Nola: there's up to 12 people, so I had to come up with twelve roles. So they were things like, 'eternal optimist' as we have mentioned, eternal pessimist, story teller, cultural advocate, equity advocate, the experiences everything person. So I had quite a collection of roles from which to choose and actually choosing who was having which role was probably the fun part. Another aspect of using the role plays was that at the end of the activity they had to in their portfolio say what it was like to be in that particular role and then they had to guess what roles the other people in their group had. They were actually quite accurate. The big trouble that they had was trying to figure out what role I had, and what they didn't realise is, I hadn't assigned myself a role, I was staying in my teacher role and they were a little bit amused by that. So, kind of added a little fun aspect to it by letting them guess.

Elizabeth: OK, so they enjoyed that?

Nola: Yeah, they did. Yeah.

Elizabeth: And what happened? Did it make a difference to their behaviour online?

Nola: Oh, it definitely made a difference. And occasionally in their portfolio the person who was the eternal pessimist might say "Nola this is really horrible, I can't imagine what being pessimistic all the time is like, it's just not me. Why did you choose this role for me?" And, um, you know they were really out of their comfort zones, but they were having fun. But one of the biggest impacts that some of the more reticent students found, was that it gave them permission to behave in a different way - they could be more outgoing, they could use the literature, because one of the roles was 'literary giant', and they could do things that they hadn't been brave enough to do before and that I think was probably the biggest spin-off. I had a number of people for whom English was not their first language and they really made considerable effort to appear to be less shy than they had before. That was a bonus. It was as if I was giving them permission to try behaving in a different way and we don't usually do that as people.

Elizabeth: And next time? Will you do that again?

Nola: Would I do it again? I definitely would do it again, but I would try to come up with some a wider repertoire of roles, I would think about whether I would let the students self-select their role cause that could add a different dimension. Yes, I definitely would do it again, but I would be very careful about when I did it in the paper (NZ for course/subject/module) because it needs to be at a time when people know each other and they feel safe to take some risks.

Elizabeth: Well, thank you Nola.