Gamifying an Online course on Blackboard

Gamifying an Online course on Blackboard

Jose Diaz, Thomas Eley

We ran a survey during the Summer break and we asked students if they had any negative experiences taking online classes. The top responses we received were “I experienced loneliness in my online course.” The other was “the instructor was disengaged and slow to respond and provide feedback.” Our aim for this study is to see if we able to find resolutions to these two problems.

The online environment can easily become a place of isolation due to the lack of physical human presence which can lead to all parties easily becoming disengaged if there is a lack of socializing, a healthy amount of competition, rewards, and camaraderie. A desolate course that encourages individual learning only rewards the highly motivated individuals. We want to create an online course that not only rewards the highly motivated student but that creates motivation in all students through social learning. In order to motivate all students there needs to a sense of camaraderie and an opportunity for collaboration in an online environment. Creating this type of online environment can be technologically difficult.

The first problem we decided to tackle is the issue of loneliness. There is not much of a sense of social presence in Blackboard. For the course Icebreaker, we had the students create avatars using the Bitmoji tool. Bitmoji is a free tool that allows you to create a cartoon character of yourself to use as your own personal avatar. It is most often used on mobile apps like Instagram and Twitter for communication purposes.

What a great way to introduce the course with an icebreaker assignment that allows students to create a cartoon character of themselves. The instructor-led by example and created his own Bitmoji avatar and the students followed his lead. Now when students participate in the course discussions, they will have a face or avatar to go along with the comments that they are responding too. We also encouraged the instructor and students to use the premade Bitmoji image library to communicate their thoughts and ideas throughout the course.

Blackboard provides several features that we adapted to gamify our course. We used the Blackboard adaptive release feature extensively to allow us to hide course content until a puzzle was solved. We organized the course into levels. Each level represents a unit that is comprised of two weeks worth of content. For a student to open the first level they will need to solve a puzzle and if the team is successful they will receive a key that will unlock the next level. These puzzles are based on the course content for that particular week. To unlock the first level we asked students a simple question to get them started. What is the SUNY Help Desk phone number? If they had read the course syllabus they would know the phone number to the SUNY Help Desk and once entered correctly level 1 content folder is revealed to them.

The idea to gamify the course is based on team collaboration. The course is divided into several teams of 4 to 5 students in each team. Students individually complete all the readings, videos, discussions and assessments, then they come together to solve a team puzzle.  Each team member will need to work together to complete the puzzle that will unlock the key that will open the next level. We used the Blackboard achievement tool that awards students badges for unlocking a level or completing a puzzle.

We are currently at week 2 and we haven’t collected enough information but we can say that twelve out of the nineteen students have unlocked level 1 content folder and eighteen of the nineteen students have created a Bitmoji for the course. We will collect surveys at different stages of the course to measure student loneliness and motivation.