Maintaining the momentum throughout the campaign: Role-play in political communication

Abstract

The Campaign is an online simulation of an election campaign in which students role-play as journalists and political advisers. Maintaining the momentum throughout the role-play is a challenge in an online environment. In the case of The Campaign, the momentum is maintained as a result of the tight integration of events in the role-play, student activities, assessment tasks, skills-based mini-workshops, in the lecture topics and reading tasks. Students indicated The Campaign was.fun. and.engaging. and gave them a break from traditional essay writing. They enjoyed the problem solving aspects. It was useful in forging productive working relationships between themselves and other students, whic..