Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 108, May 2017, Pages 85-95
Computers & Education

Role immersion in a history course: Online versus face-to-face in Reacting to the Past

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Reacting to the Past, a humanities role-immersion pedagogy, was studied.

  • Online mode was compared to face-to-face mode.

  • Learning outcomes were similar in both versions, but students preferred the face-to-face mode.

  • The authors suggest ways to adapt elements of the online version to a blended format.

  • The study furthers the evaluation the efficacy of different modes of teaching and learning.

Abstract

This article assesses Reacting to the Past, a humanities role-immersion pedagogy that is popular at many colleges and universities in the United States. This pedagogy has been found to have many learning gains compared to traditional face-to-face teaching, but has not been adequately compared to online versions of the course. The findings of the article suggest that while learning gains can be achieved that are comparable to face-to-face versions of the course, student satisfaction was lower. The article concludes not by rejecting the online Reacting to the Past, however, but by suggesting possible ways to incorporate successful elements of it within a blended approach. These findings will be of interest to people interested in this particular pedagogy, but also to those who are interested in the general comparison between online and face-to-face learning and teaching.

Introduction

This paper evaluates whether a popular humanities face-to-face role-immersion pedagogy can effectively be reproduced online. Reacting to the Past is based in Barnard College at Columbia University. The extended, immersive role-playing games they have developed are now featured in hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States. The founder, Mark C. Carnes, has pitched the Reacting method in part as an effective defense of face-to-face teaching. But can this successful pedagogy be effectively reproduced online? This article will be the first to test the learning efficacy and student perceptions of Reacting in online and face-to-face environments. Carnes' book Minds on Fire illustrates how successful the pedagogy is in face-to-face settings, but there is no clear analysis of whether that success is dependent in some way on this mode of delivery.

There are two levels of comparison in the study. First, the article analyses the learning and satisfaction of students in a 2015 Reacting to the Past course who played games both in online and face-to-face modes. Second, the article compares student perceptions and learning in a previous iteration of the course (2013) that had two face-to-face immersive game sequences with the 2015 version.

These comparisons are rooted in analyses of assessment results and student evaluations. The paper analyses student learning performance across the two learning environments in the 2015 version, but also when appropriate with assessment elements that were in common with the 2013 version. Analysis focuses on overall academic performance, including failure rates and class mark distribution. It also analyses student perceptions of the experience through student evaluations in 2013 and 2015, and via a student survey designed around the issues discussed in this article, and focus groups for the 2015 cohort.

The study contributes to the broader issue of applying role play/role immersion to the online environment. The educational literature indicates that this can be carried out successfully online (Blanco-Fernández et al., 2014, Kirkpatrick et al., 2012, Maier and McLaughlan, 2001, Russell and Shepherd, 2010), but it has not been rigorously compared to a face-to-face version—particularly in the developed, immersive form of role play that Reacting delivers.

Section snippets

Review of literature

Role play as a learning tool has been in existence for many years. At its heart, role play requires learners to play the role of a character in a scenario and to respond and interact within the defined parameters of that role. Whilst students can expect to learn factual information, role playing is primarily designed to develop new perspectives (Westrup & Planander, 2013) and enhance critical thinking around the issues covered in the role play. In essence, role play is an active strategy to

Participants

The study involves students at an Australian university in two versions of the course New York City in Revolution: Reacting to the Past. One was offered in 2013 and the other was offered in 2015. In order to keep class sizes small, the instructor offered multiple versions of the course in each of these years with class sizes ranging from 14 to 30 students. But all students in each year experienced the same course design. The course was open to students in their second and third years.

The 2013

Discussion

Overall, this study method has several strengths. It uses the same cohort of students in order to compare learning outcomes and student preferences for online and face-to-face delivery modes using the same Reacting to the Past role-immersion pedagogical approach. It also then compares their satisfaction and learning with an earlier cohort of students who experienced an entirely face-to-face class. The Learning Management System that provided the online environment is typical of many utilized in

Conclusion

The conclusion of this study, however, is more subtle than the general finding of face-to-face success would suggest. Some students performed better in the online role immersion, and a significant number reported special strengths in this mode. There are also cost implications involved in the sort of small group face-to-face learning that is the subject of this study, which was at least in part the catalyst for the research. The question thus becomes how to harness the successes of the online

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the students at the University of Adelaide who agreed to volunteer for this research study. Thanks to Daniel Palmer for his work in the quantitative analysis.

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