After reading Melissa Conrey’s post this week, I was inspired to think a little bit about my own online course design and how it impacts interaction.  I am not taking the certificate class right now, but I am excited that following along gets me thinking about my own work.  I am trying something new in my discussion board in my current online class, thanks to a suggestion made by Jim Julius at a POT First Friday face-to-face workshop early this month.  I am enjoying the results.  This past week, which is still wrapping up, I had students sign up to be an early childhood education philosopher from a certain time period in history.  Then, they were to introduce themselves as the philosopher and tell others about their philosophy.  For the replies, they were prompted to stay in character.

This has been going so well that I am doing the same thing again next week.  It just so happens that this coming week we are looking at child development theorists, rather than early childhood education philosophers, so this role-play exercise will still work quite well.  I am also thinking about how I could still have them take on roles for other topics and have a few ideas.

I wanted to mention this here because I think it is a simple shift that relates to course design.  If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, it would be great to see what you all think about this.  Have you tried something similar?  Do you have suggestions?  Do you think students might be more likely to share strong opinions when they can do it as a character and not themselves?  Is writing from the perspective of a character more challenging and could that turn people off from posting?