Motivation and Structuring in a Virtual Database Practical by Means of Roleplaying

The Virtual University (VU) is a complex learning environment and was developed at the FernUniversitat Hagen (Distance Teaching University) to fully integrate the advantages that the internet offers to learning communities. We developed an environment in which students can fully participate at a database-practical, working in teams without ever meeting physically. We are currently carrying out the second cycle of the database practical and bring in the experiences of the first term. In this paper we describe how we use roleplaying as a didactical accentuation for a virtual database-practical for initialising group work, structuring group work and motivating participants who are in a problematic learning situation permanently for the whole duration of a course requiring a whole semester. The practical is completely virtual and no physical presence in Hagen is required. Except for three online chats following the milestones described in this paper, there are no synchronous communication events scheduled. The students work in teams in distributed groupwork, we provide them with the necessary groupware tools and a database for hands-on-activity. To enhance the motivation of the participating students we decided to embed the problem, i.e. modelling a database for a Content-Management-System for the Website of the FernUniversitat, into a roleplaying situation. The workgroup is asked to act as a young start-up company, who are fictously supported by an (existing) entrepreneur program initiated by the government of Northrhine-Westphalia, the state in which the FernUniversitat is located. We integrated the roleplaying situation into the practical in such a way that it acts as an agent for structuring the work of our students and the sequence of the practical itself. We integrated an invitation to tender into the roleplay, in such a way that that our students are requested to submit a synopsis, a concept and at the end of the practical a complete database solution. The experiences in the current semester are very promising. Our students are highly motivated, we haven’t any dropouts so far and the first solutions are very well elaborated. We can say that the roleplaying situation is helpful for our students and keeps their motivation high and the structuring by means of this roleplay is working just in the way we intended it to be.