Creating a Gamification Elective

This week marks the beginning of my final semester in the Online Teaching and Instructional Design(OTID) program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. I have learned a lot in this program and am very excited to have the opportunity to apply what I learn in my practicum course this semester. As my practicum, I am working with Dr. Molly Duggan (Molly’s blog can be found here) to develop a Gamification elective for the OTID program. I have been fascinated with the concept of gamification since I learned about it during an earlier course in the program and am very excited for the opportunity to pursue this topic on a much deeper level.

I don’t have a whole lot to report this week, since we are just getting started, but I am sure that there will be lots of interesting things to report in future blogs.

Description

This week was a planning week. Molly and I met on Monday to figure out what we wanted to include as content for the course and to begin dividing the work load. We knew last semester that we were going to be developing this course together and Molly has been sharing information with me to try to bring me up to speed.  Given our basic understanding of the topic, we were able to come up with a general outline for the course. We agreed that we would both begin research on our topic for the week (mine is Game Elements) and development of the associated module and reconvene next Monday.

I know a little bit about Game Elements from the reading that I have done and also from a Coursera course on Gamification that I recently completed. I plan to spend the snowy weekend digging much deeper into the topic, looking for scholarly articles and trying to come up with relevant assignments (one fun one will be to play a game of their choosing and analyze the game elements that were used and how well they were implemented).

Game Elements Pyramid by Kevin Werbach

Feelings

I am very excited about what we will be doing in this course. The more I learn about gamification, the more interested I become in the topic. I am blessed to be working with Molly who has been reading up on this topic much longer than I have and will be a wonderful subject matter expert. There is so much to learn about gamification and it is a very

Analysis

There isn’t much to analyze at this point. I have been thinking a lot about how I will contribute to the design of this course since I am so far behind Molly in subject matter knowledge. I have decided that the disparity in our backgrounds isn’t a bad thing. I will be coming to the course design as someone who wants to learn more about the topic, which is also where our future students will be coming from, and this will allow me good insight into what someone who is new to gamification might want to know. I also have confidence in my abilities as an instructional designer and will be able to make a strong contribution in that area. Molly and I will pair up quite nicely in this regard.

Conclusion and Action Plan

My conclusion this week is that I need to get busy on my research. Our meeting was on Monday, and with this blog post being due on Thursday that really didn’t give me much time to dig into my topic. Given the impending snow storm, there should be time this weekend for me to begin finding content for and building my module. There are lots of game elements, so I don’t anticipate any problems finding content – most likely it will be a problem keeping the content at a manageable level.

The way that I typically work is to develop my content in a Word document, then bring it in to Canvas when I have a feel for how it will come together. I will most likely build this content in a Google document so that Molly can have easy access to it. In her reading Molly has found two books that she feels might work as textbooks for this course. I plan to read over the game elements section of those books to see what they have to say, then use the knowledge gained there to begin researching. Articles and ideas will be compiled which will eventually turn into the module for the course.

Check back next week for more on how the course is progressing.

Werbach, K, & Hunter, D. (2012). For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business. Wharton Digital Press: Philadelphia.