With some creativity we can motivate and engage our students in learning without incurring extra cost for complicated technologies. We will report our pilot project of course gamification with our current Blackboard system and other free tools. We will share instructional notes, students’ reflection journals and survey responses.
Motivating and engaging students in learning has always been a pursuit of educators of all levels, including higher education institutions. Of many efforts in this direction, gamification is one of the hot topics in educational innovations in recent years.
Gamification, which may or may not involve the direct use of games as activities in teaching, refers to the application of gaming principles or components to course design such as competition, freedom to fail, leaderboards, badges, level systems, and rewards.
We have a strong interest in piloting gamification for several reasons. In addition to the general purpose of motivating students to learn, we find it a fulfilling project in relation to our mission as a teacher education program. In particular, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards for Teachers speak to our aspiration in this course of Instructional Technology, in which this pilot project is carried out: facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity; design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments; model digital age work and learning; promote and model digital citizenship; and engage in professional growth and leadership.
To implement gamification frequently involves a lot of preparation and even extra expenses on technologies. Our literature review of gamification projects informs us of four situations. Some educators and researchers have acquired assistance from their IT departments in developing special modules compatible to their learning management systems (LMS). Some higher education institutions, e.g. University of Michigan, are developing their own gamification-featured LMS, the GradeCraft. Thirdly, some for-profit LMS, e.g. Academy LMS, are also in existence. A fourth situation is making use of non-LMS virtual environments such as MineCraft, which also means expenses.
As common instructors, however, especially when we do not want to incur any extra cost on our students, or when IT conditions or human resources are not available, we believe we should undertake the responsibility of seeking innovative approaches to teaching that provide both meaningful and affordable education to our students. Innovative approaches to education (teaching and learning) should not rely solely on innovations of technologies. Actually, as teacher educators, we always encourage our prospective teachers to be creative within available conditions. Out of these considerations, we are piloting gamification in our instructional technology course through the current Blackboard system at our institution and other tools freely available on the Internet such as the unpaid version of Survey Monkey.
In this pilot project, we do not intend, and feel unable, to apply all principles of gamification we can identify from literature review. We do find, however, that the Gameful Pedaogy by GradeCraft, the gamified LMS still in development by the University of Michigan, is a good framework to start with. Out of this framework, we selected the following principles to follow and achieve:
- Provide students the room of self-determination including, but not restricted to, choices of tasks, choices of time to complete, and the freedom to fail.
- Provide instant feedback.
- Provide grading transparency.
- Provide rewards or badges for sub-module excellence to keep students engaged.
Specifically, in our actual course design, we implemented the following major practices.
Democracy in course design through discussion of syllabus. We surveyed what students wanted to learn, but we also discussed what the instructor intended to teach and other issues such as what weights should be assigned in the overall grade. This democratic process was to engage students in the metacognitive thinking of course design and for the class to reach consensus on how to proceed. Different from a typical semester in which the syllabus is ready by the first class, this syllabus wasn’t until after the second class.
Providing choices. In two of the required modules, reading discussion presentations and technology integration demonstrations, students are allowed to select a minimum number of the topics and have the freedom of deciding when to present within a range of 2-13 weeks depending on the topics. Technically, we created a wiki page in the Blackboard course site on which students sign themselves up for the topic and time they plan to present. ‘First come, first served.’ While a certain reading cannot be repeated in the module of reading discussion, a technology used in the technology integration demonstration is not encouraged but can be repeated for the reason that different people may apply a technology in different ways for their specific content areas of teaching. Despite choices, however, we do apply restrictions to the sequence of some topics considering the learning process itself and the sequence of lecture topics as deemed appropriate by the instructor; technically this ‘unlocking’ behavior is realized by means of the ‘adaptive release’ function in Blackboard.
Peer review. For all work that happen in the classroom, including the evaluation of participation, we engage students in peer reviews through links (integrated in Blackboard) to Survey Monkeys. Before the review of each type of work, we first discuss and reach agreement on rubrics to use for the peer review. In response to students’ hope to avoid simple ranking (a reflection of the leader board in gaming), we selected and converted a free tool in Survey Monkey so that all students can be listed in the same survey question and each student can receive qualitative feedback if the reviewer chooses to provide it. Technically, it is also important to set up the survey so that reviewers can submit the same survey multiple times due to the fact that not all students choose to present on the same topic on the same day. For privacy considerations, we copy-paste each student’s qualitative feedback received in Survey Monkey into the feedback text frame in each student’s gradebook in Blackboard.
Multiple submissions. For example, we allow students to submit the teaching statement twice with the only precondition that the first attempt should meet minimal quality requirement. We provide feedback for each student in Blackboard, but we also highlight the strengths of some other students openly in class to achieve the potential of socio-cognitive learning theories. Technically, we set the Blackboard grade center to accept the higher grade of the two.
Bonuses and badges. To encourage excellence or give students opportunities to make up grade loss on previous work, we assign bonus points to extra work within the list of choices, and even to extra curriculum activities that may be considered related to the learning objectives in this class. We also grant badges to students for their excellence in certain aspects of the whole course. For example, a badge of Engagement may be granted to students with full-attendance and top participation peer-review ratings. Another example, students who have won a first place in video and audio integration in teaching may win a badge certifying their competence in educational integration of multimedia. Technically, this is realized by means of the Achievement tool in Blackboard and a badge is triggered by the satisfactory scores for the related item in the grade center.
Deselection of ‘running total’ and the Use of Grade Predictor. We avoid using the setting of ‘calculate as running total’ in the Blackboard grade center because we want to create a hunger in students for higher grades like higher points in gaming; it’s better to see points being accumulated than lost. Meanwhile we want to help students predict their final grade since they are given the freedom of choices and the scenario of choices as well as actual topic-specific grades may change throughout the semester. The grade center in Blackboard does allow students to see their own grades as have been filled in by the instructor, but students themselves cannot manipulate the grade book to see different scenarios of grades as is possible for the users of the grade predictor in the GradeCraft of the University of Michigan. We have, however, created a grade predictor using Microsoft Excel. We shall see whether or not students are actually using it to motivate themselves.
We are a Mid-Western private university characteristic of small class sizes. Although our experiences and lessons may not be directly applicable to other types of colleges, we would like to contribute to the community of educators our knowledge learned from our action research. Our pilot is currently going on, a reflective discussion is scheduled to take place around the mid-term examination time to summarize the first half of the pilot and make necessary adjustments for the second half.
The initial responses reflected in students’ weekly reflection journals seem to suggest we are achieving our purpose of motivating and engaging students. Students have expressed their love of the democratic process, the choices, the flexibility in scheduling, and the learning from the peer reviews. By the time of the OLC conference we will be able to report more details including the syllabus, the instructor’s notes of actions and considerations, students’ reflection journals, students’ responses to a semester-end survey to be administered by the instructor and researcher, and students’ course evaluation to be administered by the university.