The significance of active learning is becoming increasingly acknowledged as a way of increasing the involvement, motivation and responsibility of students in higher education. Role-play as a pedagogy has been used in a wide variety of contexts and content areas. Essentially, it is the practice of having students take on specific roles, usually ones in which they are not familiar and act them out in a case-based scenario for the purpose of learning course content or understanding “complex or ambiguous concepts”. Thus role playing is also used as a teaching pedagogy at RNB Global University.
A Role Play Competition for the students of MBA and BBA named "Manager play" was conducted at the University campus. An assorted group of students was formed, each group was having a combination of BBA II semester, BBA IV semester and MBA II semester students with the MBA students as team leaders. Each group was given a particular topic on which they had to perform the role play. The topics comprised of domain related concepts of marketing and HR. Students enacted roles of National Sales Manager, Regional Sales Manager, Salesperson for door to door selling, HR manager conducing interview, student as interviewees for internship to name a few. A narrator aided the transition of scenes from one to another, not to miss the use of slides as backdrop for various scenes. Students performed enthusiastically and showcased their talent, creativity along with their managerial skills.
It helped the students to
- Analyze problems from various perspectives
- To apply their knowledge to a given problem, to reflect on issues and the views of others
- Trying various solutions in a case scenario
- Developing team-work, co-operation and creative problem solving in groups
The winning team was that of Priyanka Baid and second position was secured by Nikita Soni’s team. The host of the event was Priyanka Baid and the judges for the competition were Dr. Ajoy Mitra, Mrs Namratta Kaushal and Dr. Mahendra Ghadoliya. Feedback was given by the judges to the students and their efforts were appreciated. The event was coordinated by Dr. Manjoo Saraswat and Ms Shalini Joshi.