General plugins

Hi Penny,

This looks very promising! I can think of a number of ways to use this in cross-cultural communication, negotiation, and problem solving skills training.

If the development team needs some actual training material for reference, let me know and I can send off a few pdfs.

Bill

This sounds very interesting.  I had some thoughts - maybe these were covered in the Wiki already (I have only really scanned through it).

When I think of role playing, I think of the Dungeons & Dragons type games, which I never played (video games took over at a young age for me).  But from what I understand, the players role a dice to see what happens to them in situations, to simulate "luck" or whatever.  Also, the person in charge of the game throws in specific circumstances to make the game interesting, and then sees how the players react.  This could be interesting in a role-playing module.

Players are given a set of choices, and then what they choose determines how the role-play goes.  I think the "Lesson" module already handles lessons like this, but it would be interesting to see the discussion format of role playing follow this, too.  Pick choice one, you are stuck in xx thread (or chat room), choose choice one, you are stuck in yy thread, etc.  And you aren't allowed to cross post, until that section of the role play is over.  There could even be a "randomized" choice that simulates roling of dice, where the teachers gives a set number of options that could happen, and students are randomly assigned to each one, and has to deal with it from there.

Also, I could see the need for the teacher to have several roles, and maybe need to play different "characters" at different times.

I'm pretty interested in the possibility of implementing a role-playing and simulation module in Moodle. I've read the article Martin's posted in another topic and it's very interesting and fits well in some language teaching approaches (I'm Brazilian Portuguese as Foreign Language teacher)

I migrated to Moodle recently and I'm still thinking how to migrate my so-full-of-role-play-classes into the my courses.

My biggest difficulty is to integrate my virtual world Flash animation with Moodle modules or blocks, which would be too much great. Every time I think about role-playing, I think about something quite much graphic, with good visual appeal... maybe coz my Flash developer background.

Is it what you people are thinking about? It sounds like some huge work! But I'd love to help

Anyway, I'll read the links provided by you, Penny!

Letícia.

We have an update to the Roleplay module that we've been working on here at Catalyst. The module currently works only with Moodle 1.6, but it should work with both PostgreSQL and MySQL. It is adapted from the Forum module.

In a traditional teacher/student scenario, the module would allow a teacher to create a forum, with the following additional options:

1. Maximum roles per participant
2. Students may choose their own role
3. Roleplay still visible once complete

The teacher then has the option to:

1. Create a bunch of new roles for the roleplay
2. Import roles she has already created to the roleplay
3. Import site-wide (public) roles to the roleplay

Once there are enough roles to cover all students, the teacher can open the roles up for students to adopt their own roles, or can assign a role to each student herself.

The teacher may also adopt an alias for the roleplay, and when posting to the forum, will have the option to post as the role, or as herself.

It is hoped and expected that students will be able to post to the forum without worrying that their identity will ever be known to other students.

If this module is useful or interesting to you, please post your feedback here. We're really keen for this to take on a life of its own.

Roleplay Module in Contrib
Roleplay Module Download

Roleplaying can obviously have great learning benefits, as long as the real identities of the role players are explicit. Allowing people to play roles anonymously I believe would only encourage what is becoming a serious problem on the internet and that is people hiding behind fake names to carry out attacks on others. I would argue that it is more realistic for students to at least know who are playing the other roles rather than be totally anonymous. Because in real life we have to answer for our actions when we do them with our own name attached. An anonymously played role will probably act differently from how people normally should act.

I know this module is ancient, but is there any news on it getting updated, or is it being left to die? If it is, I might try and give it a rework when I get a chance, but if there's someone out there that could give me a few pointers, or want to help me get this mod working again, that would be great. Having only worked with moodle since version 1.9, I'm not sure how the older version differ, so trying to find the issues might be tricky, but always up for a challenge.