Gamifying a course, phase 11: Game Over

Tasks are submitted and graded, badges collected, job interviews completed, and life at Mountain View Community College is on hold now until January 2019.

Time to reflect and regroup.

Technology, Gaming, and You

Students completed an in-course assessment exploring their experience with games, technology, and their attitudes toward learning.

Student age ranged from 36 to 57, with a mean age of 47. All were employed full time, and they reported having regular access to a computer both at home and in their office. They accessed Canvas through both their computers and their smartphones. They did not report a history of game play, either on their cell phones or through their computers, with the exception of "a little Candy Crush."Although one student was familiar with virtual worlds such as Second Life or Mindcraft, the others were not.

They were familiar with more traditional games such as crossword puzzles, word searches, Jeopardy,

Tetris, board games, chess, checkers, Scrabble, jigsaw puzzles, and video games

They reported feeling strongly connected to one another and felt supported in this course, appreciating timely feedback.

Other Tidbits

All students earned all badges, spending anywhere between 55 and  60  hours in Canvas. (NOTE: I logged 326 hours to create, tweak, grade, and problem-solve in this course, so we all spent  a lot of time in Canvas. Interesting to note, students in other courses sent far more time in Canvas that same semester, ranging from 29 hours to 133, with  mean of  75.3 hours.)

All submissions were on time (all 57 of them!) as compared to a more traditional online course with 18 submissions, where 75% of students had at least one late submission.

The final project at Mountain View Community College  was a one-hour interview for their dream job....with their interview responses integrating what they had learned throughout their time as  visiting staff member. Students seemed to enjoy this type of final project (I know that I did) as a change from a written submission...but they did have to think fast on their feet in their interview responses.

Students also participated in a final forum where they identified three pieces of new information and why they this information was important to them....one last chance for them to reflect together and to explore course learning.

 For Further Reflection... and MVCC 2.1

Mobile access.  MVCC 1.0 was not designed for mobile use, but for PC access. I was not deliberately omitting that group, I simply did not design the course to be mobile friendly. The next iteration, then, will need to become mobile friendly...which means I need to become Canvas mobile app savvy.

Motivation.  These students were highly motivated and well matched spending equal mounts of time within Canvas, then branching out on their own to work on MVCC tasks. I am unable to determine however, whether this is connected to the gamified design, a strong sense of classroom community,  or to personal attitudes and behaviors. They all "strongly agreed"  with statements such as, "It  is important to me to be a good student," "I expect to work at studying in college," "I am committed to being an active participant in my college studies," "I find learning to be fulfilling, " "I allow sufficient time for studying," and "I feel really motivated to be successful in my college career." The connection between gamifying a course and motivation needs further exploration, so I plan to increase class size the next time this course is offered.

Pacing. This course required a lot of work on the students' parts, so I tried to be mindful of their time and build in some breathing spaces where they could work on their Experiences Paper and Video...but I evidently did not do a good job of explaining that to students as several remarked about uneven  pacing.  I will definitely look into this to see what I can do to improve pacing in MVCC 2.1.

Student interaction and sharing. The quality of the work I was reading was so good that I wanted them to share it with one another to increase opportunities for learning.  To do that, however, means requiring an additional assignment where they post and  share.  While useful in theory as a learning task, do I really want to increase the number of required tasks?  After all, they had 57 submissions in  the 15-week course. Perhaps I could add one final forum where they share an item they created during the semester, an item that makes them the most proud.

Experiences paper/video.  In this assignment students interviewed a faculty member teaching in  a transfer course,  a vocational-technical faculty member, and a staff member, shadowing all three and comparing and contrasting their experiences in working with students. Each student said they learned  a lot from this assignment and to be sure to include it....but next time I want to do  better job of integrating it within the specific modules.  I thought I did so this time, but I am sure this could always be done better. While the video quality was good, it was not as creative as I had hoped, so I want to delve into that area a little more.

Module design.  Module design is still little clunky to me and clutters up Canvas for the student.  Lacking the ability to create a module-within -a module  is somewhat problematic when trying to give students assignment choices and connect them to the gradebook and/or provide badges based on specific tasks, but I believe I have figured out a work around (playing with it this summer).  If it works as planned, I will log about this later.
 
I have truly enjoyed this journey into gamifying a class...and have already started gamifying another course for the upcoming fall and will begin tweaking MVCC 2.1 later this summer.

Game on!