Engagement

Description Role playing in the context of educational simulations has been cited as a particularly engaging strategy for online courses (Ausburn, 2004; Bender, 2005; Cornelius, Gordon, & Ackland, 2011; Lytle, Lytle, & Brophy, 2006; Serby, 2011). Such role playing when conducted for an extended time period (e.g., for the duration of an academic term) in…

In an online course, a frequent criticism is that the PowerPoint presentations are poorly designed and critical supporting information is often missing (with no presenter to fill in the blanks!). On the other hand, instructional simulations combine multimedia elements (i.e. sound, images, video, etc) to represent (simulate) particular aspects of an actual situation (Hays, 2006).…