Abstract
A role-play training system for enhancing efficiency of education in project management is proposed and its effectiveness evaluated. The system is essentially a Web application that runs an interactive virtual project, in which each learner assumes the role of one of its stakeholders, is given a series of directions, and sends his/her responses back to the system for evaluation. It is a non-intelligent system driven by a scenario written in XML that defines the scope of the virtual project, gives information on the stakeholders, issues a series of directions to the participants, and describes how to evaluate their responses and how to run the virtual project. The results of the experiment show an about 2.5-fold improvement in productivity: The preparation time required with the proposed system was about 10 hours, whereas that with a conventional approach was 25 hours, in which a series of cue cards was distributed to all the participants in a controlled manner as it became necessary. Further, a gain in productivity in scenario development is expected since it has been made easier to debug, and fine-tune the difficulty level of, the scenario and also through recycling o scenarios.
