January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

In designing the discussion activity, we recommend that teachers design a series of scenarios that offer students the
opportunity to change roles in many different tasks. This design may help enhance knowledge construction and
diversity of cognitive thinking. Such an approach awaits future empirical researches for further in-depth analysis. In
addition, there is much to be examined in the domain of role-playing-based online learning, including how realistic
the learning community’s role-playing is, and how factors are correlated to learning motivation and learning
performance.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the projects from the National Science Council, Republic of China, under contract
number NSC-99-2511-S-011-007-MY3, NSC-98-2511-S-011-006, NSC- 97-2631-S-003-002, and NSC-97-2511-S-
011-004-MY3.
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