Role-plays are one of the oldest and most natural teaching methods. You can see children pretending to be warriors who protect their land, mothers caring for their babies, pirates, superheroes – the list of these games is endless! But what is fascinating about this activity is that it doesn’t come from the top. Neither parents nor teachers tell their kids to play these games – they simply feel the urge to do it, like hundreds of generations before them.
If you’re wondering how you can add role-plays to your eLearning projects, here are two options:
- A traditional role-play: face-to-face sessions, during which learners assume their roles (a salesperson and a customer, a supervisor and a subordinate, etc.) and act out various scenarios. You can add this activity using a blended learning approach.
- An online role-play: create interactive role-plays with an authoring tool, upload them to your LMS, and track learner progress as with any other eLearning content.
So, you can enhance your eLearning with this type of fun and insightful exercise that learners love. In this article, you’ll learn the five basic use cases in which role-plays are the perfect approach for your eLearning. Check them out!
General Communication Skills Training
Teams can face multiple issues connected with interpersonal communication. Things like sexual harassment, racism, ageism, and others are well known today. But, unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that we’re all beyond making these gaffes. People can also simply be unfriendly and mean, which lowers team morale. One of the core reasons for offensive behavior is the inability to look at the situation from a different perspective. And here, role-plays can be of enormous help.
Once you identify the challenges your team needs to address, prepare a role-play that recreates the conflictive situation and helps learners understand the appropriate ways to handle it or simply shows how the situation appears from a different perspective.
Sales Training
The sales department is a crucial part of any company, the success of which directly depends on a sales team’s performance. At the same time, salespeople are always busy communicating with customers and developing plans to land deals. As a result, they don’t have enough time for training. That’s why they often learn through trial and error while working on real-life cases. But the company’s executives might not be terribly excited about such an approach.
Role-plays, especially the online role-plays that are available anywhere at any time, are a brilliant solution. Salespeople get to make as many mistakes as they need to, while no actual customer suffers from their incompetence or ineffective approach. Another excellent solution for sales training can be various call center games that motivate agents, level up their professional skills, and teach them how to solve problems.
Customer Service Training
Customer service is another pillar of business success. Every company runs into issues connected with products, delivery, special offers, clients’ misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, and even anger. Overcoming these challenges is essential to keep the company’s brand intact. That’s why you might want to help your employees prepare for all sorts of situations by providing them with role-plays based on real-life cases from the company’s experience. To do this in the shortest time possible and achieve high quality, check out these 8 popular role-playing scenarios for customer service training.
Onboarding
Entering a new workplace is like exploring a new world. Companies can have their own communication rules, traditions, and even vibe that new hires should get used to during the onboarding process. With role-plays, you can give new employees a chance to do this without any stress and the fear of acting silly on their first day.
Storytelling at Schools
Of course, business isn’t the only area where role-plays are a good fit. Schools are a great match, too. Starting from games on training communication skills and ending with entire courses presented with a storytelling approach, role-plays can be a fantastic asset for teaching both children and grown-ups almost any subject without boring them. Imagine teaching languages with interactive role-plays – traveling to France and Berlin and talking to native speakers without ever leaving the classroom or home!
Summing Up
Use cases of role-plays go beyond just the five presented above. This exercise addresses communication skills, which are highly needed almost everywhere. Consider trying this approach and see how engaged your learners are during the training sessions and how their behavior is transformed afterward.
