role-play: the instructor's favorite sim

The educational simulation Genre where students practice some real world skills by interacting with other real people, including other students and instructors/actors, with everyone assuming specific roles and/or characters.

Some role plays are short, about ten minutes, while others may span out across days, or even part time for months, or, in an academic setting, an entire semester.

Role plays are a well understood genre of simulations, and highly regarded by formal learning professionals. Their interface, for example, is nearly perfect. They greatly support the Learning Goals of application of new content and mastery level, and reduce the risk of choking under pressure.

However, they have several drawbacks:

• They tend to be "one-shot," and do not allow participants to repeatedly practice a skills, such as in backboards and batting cages (see also redo: can you step in the same river twice?).
• They are very expensive (see cost reduction), and do not benefit from any economies of scale. At one extreme, it might take five or six instructors to support just one end-learner, such as in a commercial airplane simulator or a senior manager role-play.
• Access to role-play opportunities tends to be very limited.
• They have fidelity issues, in that actors and players may take the simulation more seriously at the beginning of the day and less so as the day wears on.
• The Pedagogy and Coaching, including after action reviews (AARs), tend to be subjective and inconsistent.
• Often, only one or two people are role-playing, while the rest of a class is watching.
  learning.

Even though ease of deployment is an issue, most instructors are more likely to support role-plays over other types of sims.

While vendors of branching stories are quick to call their experiences virtual role-plays, their multiple choice interface precludes an interpersonal fidelity necessary for legitimate claim to the description. Massively Multiplayer Online Environments (MMOs) have a stronger claim, for better or worse, on replicating role-plays.

Role-plays are typically used to train people-facing roles (including training sales people), and any role that may have to deal with an emergency.

See virtual experience space: how I would train consultants.