Gamifying a course, phase 1

I have finally jumped in to gamifying a course in higher education.

Well, I am actually re-gamifying a course I last taught 3 years ago.  I was, well, OK, with that iteration, but wanted to improve it after teaching it once.  It has taken me a while to plan and re-designing is becoming very time-consuming...

So I thought I would share my process.
 
 I have been reflecting and blogging about gamification for almost two years now, so it is time I actually take the first step.  To learn more about the journey, begin reading with this post.

The original version

2015 course map

I first gamified EDU 604 during the fall of 2014 to begin January 2015. This process took approximately eight weeks from concept mapping to publishing. Although I was using our Canvas LMS, at that time Canvas did not have the ability to provide badges, so I used an external program 3-D Game Lab to house my gamified class.

I really enjoyed using 3-D Game Lab from the design viewpoint, but I quickly discovered several issues I needed to address before offering this course in a gamified mode again.

 This course provides an overview of 14 different units in a community college. My goal is to introduce future administrators to as many different aspects of their community college as possible to help reduce tunnel vision and expose students to other departments. The hope is that when they are administrators, they will make decisions keeping in mind the other units in their community college and understanding the impact that each decision has on community college as a whole...not just their particular unit.

Forcing students out of their comfort zone and requiring them to network with others in their community college was the underlying focus of this course. Learning about all of these other aspects, however, can become somewhat tedious, so I thought that gamifying this course could make the subject more interesting. I also wanted to allow for previous experience, giving students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge gained through experience and therefore opt out of specific units or portions thereof. Gamifying this course allowed me to more easily individualize the learning for each student.

Students first completed an assessment demonstrating their knowledge in these 14 areas, and I scored their responses awarding 10 XP,  30 XP, or 50 XP. I then created a badge for each of the XP earned, awarded that badge to each student, and that badge was used to unlock specific tasks or quests that students were to complete to earn the next badge, finish that unit, and move on to the next.


Students also were given the opportunity to earn additional badges, thereby being awarded points, when they set up their blog, created their first video, and for each virtual coffee chat they had with me. Earning three badges within 24 ours earned another badge, and completing and submitting tasks on weekends or holidays resulted in additinal badges and additioal XP. Positive behaviors were rewarded with badges.

Each unit could be completed at one of three levels. Students who completed the reading and for him only earned a bronze badge, equating to a grade of AC for that unit. Students who earned an additional 50 points by completing quests from a provided list received a silver badge (grade of B), and those who completed 100 points earned a gold badge (A). See below:

During their first week all students were required to videoconference with me. During this videoconference students shared their screens, logged into 3-D Game Lab, and demonstrated what they had already accomplished. This allowed me the chance to see where confusion existed and to help gently nudge them into the idea of a course as a game. My purpose in this was to make sure that all students understood the "game" process.

I was able to create all of the badges, create the pathways, design the quests (tasks),  and finish the syllabus all prior to beginning of the course that spring.  I also created a welcome video for students to watch:

What worked

 Quests/Tasks were simple to create, and badge awarding upon completion was easy! I was quickly able to learn how to use 3-D Game Lab, and linking XP earned to badge award was simple to accomplish. To keep from having unselected quests (tasks) stay in a student's to do list, I assigned all quests/tasks to expire at midnight of the Sunday when each unit was due. In my pre-planning stage I had made a list of all of the positive behaviors that I wanted to reinforce, and I created badges as awards for those. Such badges were awarded immediately without my having to do any checking or assigning myself. Very much a time saver!

Some quests/tasks earned a badge upon completion, while others had to be graded by me. When an assignment was submitted, and the assignment did not meet all of the requirements, students were required to revise and resubmit to reach their specific level of competency for that unit.

Some students loved this approach and worked hard to be on top and ahead of one another.

In theory, all students should have earned an A.

In theory . . . .

What didn't

Ah...where to begin . . . .

For some reason, not all students watched the welcome video, so they did not understand the course organization.  Several students did not schedule their first virtual coffee break (videoconference) with me until the second week of class, despite repeated gentle reminders to do so. Something this simple put these students at risk for the rest of the semester. They did not understand course instructions, did not know how to plan their time, did not understand how to navigate 3-D Game Lab, missed a variety of deadlines, and almost failed the course. I emailed and met with them constantly just trying to keep them involved and somewhat on track. Interesting enough, these students were taking another traditionally-designed course with me at the same time and demonstrated the same behaviors in that class as well...perhaps the issue was not gamification as much as a lack of preparedness for online graduate instruction and a lack of time management skills.

I set up my video conference Badge

In video conferences with several students, I discovered that several had never played games. They had never played bingo, they had played no video games, they were not familiar with mobile apps. They simply lacked experience in gameplay. Some of these students did quite well in this class despite lacking previous experience in gaming, yet others struggled throughout. Age was not a factor in experience with game play. Some of the millennials in the course had no experience while others did.

I believe the main issue here was not the gamified course as much as it was student's difficulty in planning and time management. This issue repeated itself with the students in other courses.

Another item that did not work as planned was the issue of turning off an assignment at a particular date. 3-D Game Lab did not have a setting for local time, and when I selected a time for an assignment to expire, it expired six hours before the time that I told it to expire. This meant students were trying to complete assignments that were vanishing while they were working on them. Sunday afternoons, then, were spent with me answering frantic emails from students who were trying to complete their last few expertise to earn a badge while trying to troubleshoot with 3-D Game Lab developers. Eventually I ended up having those quests expire 2 days later to make sure students had time to work on them the day they were due. Yes, I know they should not wait until the last minute, but. . . .

When a student read a quest and then decided to wait to begin that quest, that quest appeared to vanish from student's list. The 3-D Game Lab overview video that students viewed explained how to locate unfinished quests in their leaderboard. This tended to confuse students who sometimes assumed that if no tasks appeared on their screen that they were caught up, and some assumed they had completed the entire course in two weeks! Interestingly enough, these were the same students with time management and planning issues and who did not begin the course as quickly as their classmates did.

I used completion of the bronze badge in one unit to unlock the following unit. To me this made sense. To many of the students it made sense. Unfortunately for the students who dropped behind and their tasks expired, they were unable to proceed to the next unit because they did not meet the prerequisites to that unit. So part way through the course I had to create a special key badge to unlock a unit and manually award that badge to those students who were behind to keep them from becoming even more behind. Figuring out how to fix this took some time on my part as well as much discussion with the program's developers.

This resulted in a bifurcated class with students at opposite ends of the XP spectrum. Some of those who were behind felt as though they would never catch up, so I was constantly working with them to cheer them on, keep them engaged, and try to make sure they were successful in this course.

Forum completion badge

I like to use forums as a place for students to discuss their readings and their experiences as they can really learn from one another.  In 3D Game Lab, the forum option was open to all with no security settings, and students are unable to locate each others forums to post. To provide a safe place for a forum, I posted forums in Canvas. To try to make this less confusing for students, I created a quest in 3-D to for each forum. The quest specified what the forum was and directed students to go to a specific forum number in Canvas. The quest also told them to respond to two of their classmates in canvas and once they have made their initial post in canvas and responded to two of their classmates, they were to return to this quest in 3-D Game Lab and record the names of the students to whom they responded when they clicked on submit. While I hated to have them toggle from 3-D Game Lab to Canvas, I felt they needed the safety and privacy of a Canvas for when they were talking about their community colleges and their experiences. Some students neglected to return to 3-D Game Lab and complete the forum quest. Unfortunately, completion of the forum quest resulted in a bronze badge for that unit which, in turn, opened up the tasks for silver and gold badges along with the opening quests for the following unit. I found myself contacting some students several times to remind them to return to Game Lab to submit that quest. Eventually all of the students caught on to this, but it took some students several weeks.

Some students were two weeks ahead of other students which, again, impacted forum posts and discussion.

Quest Creator Badge

Providing choices is an integral part of games, and giving students choices in assignments gives them some independence and freedom and makes assignments more interesting for me to grade as I am not grading the same assignment completed and submitted by several students. These choices generated some interesting results. While some students consistently selected different choices within each unit, other students chose similar assignments each time, resulting in them not having as full of an exposure as I had intended. Throughout the course students had opportunities to create infographics, digital storytelling videos, proposals, narrated PowerPoint's, blog posts, reports, course syllabi, Facebook and Twitter posts, and many more. Some students, however, selected the same tasks over and over. I also provided a Create-your-own task where students had the opportunity to suggest to me a task they wanted to complete. Not a single student chose that option.

My mid semester, all students were caught up, or at least working in the same unit at the same time.  Some students,however, chose only to complete the bare minimum for each unit, resulting in a lower grade than their classmates.

Learnings

10 tasks in 10 days badge

Good habits are good habits. Students with strong time management and planning skills did well. Students lacking those skills did not. Students lacking those skills struggled in more traditional courses just as much as they did in the gamified one, so finding a way to strengthen those skills is vital to their success as a graduate student. I have considered adding a time management task to the course where students need to create a schedule demonstrating time allotted for the course.  Students completed a survey at the end of the course where they responded to questions about the gamified course, comparing their learning, engagement, and such.  I was fascinated to see that all students - despite their grade and their timeliness in the courses - said they preferred this course format to a more traditional format and that they felt they learned just as much this way. Go figure.

5 tasks in one day badge

Students need deadlines. At first I tried to not provide deadlines, but students stopped working.  Deadlines are very important to keeping students on task, particularly in an online course.

Early Bird Badge

Onboarding is key. Students need to be "on board" ASAP.  They need to understand the concept of a gamified course and their responsibility in saying on task. I am not sure how to "make" them watch a video or meet with me during the first week, but somehow that simply needs to happen to increase the chance of success.

Next Steps

 So...what's next?

To reduce confusion in moving back and forth from one program to another, I want to recreate the entire course in our Canvas LMS. while Canvas does now integrate with 3DGL, I had to pay yearly for using that program, so I copied and downloaded all quests and activities and have them stored, ready to use in Canvas.

In 2015, while Canvas did have a badge function, it was clunky and seldom worked. Now, in 2017, Canvas has integrated with Badgr to award badges, so I just need to learn the format and the functionality of the two.

I need to create a new course plan, and I want to streamline tasks, still allowing for some choices, but not as many.

More to come, so stay tuned!  On to phase 2....Onboarding!