Tag Archive for Engagement

Motivating Learners – Just add badges right?

Reading through Play As You Learn: Gamification as a Technique for Motivating Learners (2013) by Ian Glover gives an overview of the current state of gamification, with particular relevance to  education. Glover first states the three basic parts of most games:

  • Goal-focused activity
  • Reward mechanics
  • Progress tracking

Glover then notes some current uses of gamification including popular social network FourSquare.

Eventually gets to the good stuff, and touches on some criticism of gamification. These included the detriment of providing extrinsic rewards for learners who are intrinsically motivated, the addictive behaviours often associated with certain personality types (notes from Zichermann, 2011), the competitiveness of leaderboards (Williams, 2012), and the types of engagement when gamification is removed (Thoma, Millen, and DiMicco, 2012).

Glover’s main points include the following

  • Careful consideration needs to be taken before the application of gamification to learning
  • Providing extrinsic motivation for intrinsically motivated learners is detrimental
  • Gamification in earning should therefore be optional
  • Popular Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and LMSs (Learning Management Systems) provide an ideal opportunity, with tracking data already available
  • Rewards need to be desirable to all learner to motivate behavior
  • Gamifiation can be applied to non-electronic contexts

 

My references

Glover, Ian (2013) Play as you learn: gamification as a technique for motivating learners. In: HERRINGTON, Jan, COUROS, Alec and IRVINE, Valerie, (eds.) Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2013. Chesapeake, VA, AACE , 1999-2008. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/7172/

 

Glover’s References
Thom, J., Millen, D., & DiMicco, J. (2012). Removing gamification from an enterprise SNS. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’12), 1067-1070. Accessed: 27/11/2012 -http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2145204.2145362.

Williams, J. (2012). The Gamification Brain Trust: Intrinsically Motivating People to Change Behavior (part 2). Gamesbeat, Panel discussion, Wallace, M. [chair], Accessed: 26/11/2012 – http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/22/the-gamification-brain-trustintrinsically-motivating-people-to-change-behavior-part-2/#h8geQcI5BUyR5Ihv.99

Zichermann, G. (2011). Gamification has issues, but they aren’t the ones everyone focuses on. [Editorial] O’Reilly Radar. Accessed: 26/11/2012 – http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/gamification-criticism-overjustification-ownership-addiction.html

My First MOOC

Since finishing my degree I have felt this gap in my life. I think more so it’s the ways in which I now need to fill spare time I have. Spare time in previous years has been a somewhat foreign concept. Though now that I have no study commitments, I have no pressure to be spending spare moments researching, and reading. In saying that I feel like there is a small void that video games and leisure reading just isn’t filling. I have identified this as missing learning. I enjoy the process of learning and research, I enjoy acquiring new knowledge.

Image courtesy of lisamcalister.com

How do I address this insatiable desire to learn? I have no desire for another bachelors degree, and my university opportunities for further studies in my desired fields are slim, at best. So I have turned to the latest trend in education, MOOCs. A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. So its basically anyone in the world with an interest in a given topic connecting to the course. Why? many people have a variety of reasons to engage in online study.

I have enrolled in The Global Business of Sports, delivered by Penn, University of Pennsylvania, on Corsera. My course so far consists of lectures and discussion forums, with 2 assessible quizzes coming, one at the mid-point and one at the end. The lectures have been split up into modules, with a module released each week. The lectures are split up into nice digestible chucks, 20-25 minutes a piece. Then we have the forums. Coming in a little bit late to the course (mid-week 2) discussion had well an truly kicked off. This meant for some of the more interesting debate topics in the forums, postings had already reached beyond 300 posts. I found this a barrier to engaging with that particular topic since reading more than 300 posts and comments isn’t really my idea of a good time. So I sought out topics that I could jump into that hadn’t yet reached a such a size, and have had some great (almost academic) discussion. Though mostly so far it has been very low key, with most people offering their opions with no references and discussion about farourite sports and teams. I look forward to moving a little further beyond this.

Retention rates for students in MOOCs are generally pretty low. Many sources note that students will enroll but not complete the course. I need to find some good statistics for this. For the current course there is no way I can see to find out how many students are currently enrolled, and this is not something the teaching staff have shared yet. I can see many reasons for low retention rates, beyond the usual reason students may drop out of face to face style courses. There is the appeal of free, the ease in which to enroll, the seemingly low commitment required, and a dislike of the teaching method or style. I would imagine that for many it is combination of these.

This is week still week two of the course. I’m interested in if I manage to stick it out and complete the course, or whether I just become another statistic. Stay tuned.