Tips to get Started Gamifying your Online Course
Motivation and engagement. What instructor doesn’t want more of that in their learning environment? Gamification is a popular choice at the moment for adding more interactivity to the learning process, which in turn improves motivation and engagement. And while it appears that gamification can work, it does depend on the context that is being gamified. Gamification, with its mastery-based approach, also puts the onus more on the learner to be self-directed. While this may work well for some, it could spell a dead end and result in even less motivation and engagement for others. This is reiterated in gamification research.
So if you still think your course is gamifiable and you don’t sweat it over the ability of all your learners to swim, not sink, in your course’s potential gamified environment then what’s holding you back? Could it be one of these three things?
Theme — You just don’t have what you feel is a good idea for connecting your subject matter to a game-like environment.
Mechanics — You know that good games motivate their users but you don’t understand all the underlying processes that need to be used in order to harness that motivation.
Time — You love the idea but you know that gamifying your course will take a lot of time that you already don’t have.
Let’s take a look at each and see if there are solutions to help get things moving.
Maybe deciding on the storyline is all you need to get you going? Instructional designer, Neela Bell, offers a handful of popular themes she calls ‘game types’:
1. The Hero’s Journey — The hero could be a detective unraveling a mystery, a scientist facing some moral dilemma, or even an insect making its way across the campus one day. The purpose of this game type is to move towards a goal via interacting with the content, completing challenges and eventually reaching the goal.
2. The Survivor — This game type has feelings of peril and danger because it adds in a time element. You must stay alive! The learner progresses through sections with successful completion of each leading to, for example, another piece of a radio that could be used to signal for help or a ship to fly back home.
3. The Scanvenger Hunt — Collect a series of objects. The goal here is to accumulate knowledge and wealth. Maybe all the objects, when put together, provide the answer to a core concept being learned?
4. The Project — Mirroring project-based learning, the goal here is to build something. Think science fair done online. Learners go through the steps of tbe design process and earn rewards accordingly based on their progress within each step.
5. The Fantasy World — Use your content to develop a fantasy world then challenge your learners to create, write or reenact elements therein. Shakespeare? Absentee Landlords? Why not learn more about those by becoming the characters?
Need more inspiration? Neela Bell also provides 25 examples of storylines you can use to gamify your course.
Let’s start with the basics that a good game needs to have — the 3 C’s:
1. Challenges — To satisfy the learner’s core drive of accomplishment, set goals and then present a series of challenges to overcome to achieve those goals.
2. Choices — To satisfy the core drive of empowerment, build a number of choices into each challenge so that the user has the opportunity to pick — and learn — from their choices.
3. Consequences — Every choice has a consequence — good, bad or otherwise. Consequences represent the feedback component and tell users whether they are on the right track or not. This satisfies core drives like unpredictability, avoidance and scarcity.
Make sure to provide thorough onboarding and then appropriate scaffolding so that your learners all have the opportunity to succeed:
· Explicit progress indicators — Use progress bars, levels, badges, or achievements to let the learner know how they are doing and to maintain motivation.
· On-Demand assistance — Give hints or clues exactly when the learner needs them.
· Gradually increase responsibility — Remove prompts as the learner progresses through the gamified content.
Also, consider how you will distribute the content:
· Timed-release — Package your content in small bites and release them over time, not all at once. If your content is presented as a game (e.g., The Hero’s Journey) then space out the clues over time to increase engagement.
· Knowledge challenge — Ask learners to complete a quiz immediately after working through a piece of content. Tie achievements and rewards to their results.
· Daily prompts — Use notifications to prompt learners to complete a portion of the content every day.
Make sure it matters — Get the core drive of meaning working for you by ensuring learners submit a piece of work at the end that summarizes what has been learned or that the completion of all the smaller pieces along the way reinforces a connection to the content’s theme as a whole.
Turn up the heat — Use time restraints by which users have to tackle the challenges. Have appropriate consequences for making or missing, respectively, those deadlines — just like real life. For example, learners that get their work submitted on time can be awarded bonus points. If they can consistently submit work on time each time then also increase each time the amount of bonus points. If they miss a submission then drop them back down to the base level of bonus points.
Collaborate as an alternative to competition — have learners work together to best you (the instructor) in a knowledge challenge or skill application. Or reward individual students who have achieved a certain status in the gamified course by letting them pick, on behalf of the entire class, a game or activity that the whole class gets to do. Or if working in groups, allow the achievement of one group to lead to a moderate points gain for all the other groups as well. This taps into the core drive of social influence.
Core Drive of Ownership — Offer avatars that can be customized and improved upon through continued participation in the course.
Project a road map or journey so that learners can see how they go from unlearned to learned, from zero to hero.
Okay, maybe the real dilemma all along is that you just don’t have the time to commit to this project? It would be great to do but to do it well would mean overextending yourself and then what kind of outcome would you get? So consider starting small. Instead of gamifying your whole course, consider one topic, concept or unit within your course and start with that. Try it, learn from it and then consider expanding one piece at a time or keep it at only the one gamified component.
For further inspiration, here’s an excellent example of a gamified course from a high school biology teacher.
Tips to get Started Gamifying your Online Course
Research & References of Tips to get Started Gamifying your Online Course|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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