Currently binge-watching an awesome YouTube channel on gamification
There is a youtube channel that I have recently discovered that I love and just have to share after I found myself looking at the view in the featured image, talking on the phone with my friend about the channel: A former game designer, Marie-Jo Leroux, now gives advice on effective gamification of learning in a way that I find really informative and inspiring.
My friend and I were talking about teaching species identification and an example she had just heard about, where students describe a plant species that they find somewhere in enough detail that the teacher can identify it from the description. If they are the first student group to describe it, they can give it a name and nobody else can discover it. I find this weirdly colonial, but the intention is to make students discover how many different species they are once they have to move beyond the most common ones, and also to make them want to know the plants’ real names, at which point the teacher could then point them to an app that can tell them.
We were talking about how we would, instead, take the description of species and continue working with them; for example by giving them to another group who now has to find a plant that matches that description, or look up the name for the species in a field guide. Depending on the learning outcome, there could also be a step where students learn the technical terms describing for example leaf shapes, and can discuss how having specialist language can really make it much easier to communicate.
In that context, I started talking about a video on Marie-Jo Leroux’ channel on teaching bird species, which I really enjoyed: Starting out from what people are supposed to be able to do once they’ve taken the course (quickly identify birds that they might only catch a glimpse of) and how that might be assessed (put a name on a bird that you are only shown for a very short time), she develops how the species could be taught and practiced: First, in a set of five birds, people are asked to identify a duck (easy!), a chicken (also easy!), something that has “blue feet” in the name and then there is only one picture of a bird with blue feed (easy, but feels a bit like an accomplishment!), a black-necked swan and there is only one bird with a black neck (again, easy but a little accomplishment), and finally there is only one name left for the one bird that is left (also feels like an accomplishment to get that right, even if there is only one option). So now people have learned three new species already! Practicing then wasn’t so super exciting — matching names and pictures — but I really liked the other two parts!
Anyway, that is what we were talking about, and what I really enjoy about the channel is that gamification is not suggested as a layer slapped on top of content, but found within how the content is organized (maybe with learner choice, e.g. branching scenarios), teased (locked modules where you see more exciting stuff is coming up later), incentivized (progress bars or paths that show you you are almost there; badges after you accomplish something challenging); what is practiced (something that leads to the learning outcomes, or gimmick activities like navigating a virtual room in an exit game?).
I also really like the gimmick test: If a game element has low relevance to learning, but high cost (to the learner, i.e. taking time or a lot of extra clicks), it’s a gimmick.
Most recently, I watched a video on tutorials in e-learning (thinking about the tutorial-type module for the MOOC we are recording soon) and there is some advice in there that I don’t agree with, like to avoid front-loading an organizer and, for example, just let people watch a tutorial and then afterwards explain how learning from it will be assessed. This goes against everything I have read about structures that are helpful for learners, prime them for what’s to come and what to pay attention to (remember the monkey that is running through a video while you are counting how many times a ball is being passed back and forth?), and also reduce learner anxiety. On the other hand, it of course also depends on the stakes of a unit — if the whole thing is low stake enough, maybe anxiety isn’t a problem. And it’s definitely a good point to make sure that tutorials aren’t super long and boring, because if nobody actually pays any attention to them, we might as well not have put one there in the first place… And maybe we don’t have to give everything away in the tutorial, like that there will later be badges. Maybe that’s even better as a nice surprise once people get there?
I also watched a video on using e-learning for training soft skills, which on the one hand I really enjoyed, but that on the other hand also really shows the limitations of e-learning when you can only work with pre-defined, closed answer mechanics and don’t have a real person that will read free-text responses and give feedback. While you can get quite far with picking and sorting parts of a response, there is no learning and practicing and assessing of coming up with the parts of whole of a response, which is what will actually be required in real life, which the training is supposed to prepare people for. But seeing how good I think the rest of the content on the channel is, that feels a bit reassuring — if she hasn’t figured out how to do it better than that in an e-learning setting, maybe this is how good it gets and we need to use other formats if we want to do more than that.
In a video on how to teach a lot of content, I really appreciated the idea that even when learners have given the correct answer on an assessment question already, that can still be an opportunity to reinforce learning. In the example in the video, they have learnt what individual bones look like out of context, what they are called, and where they belong in the body. So when they have correctly identified the name and general location of a bone, it is shown to them one last time highlighted in a skeleton. Never waste an opportunity to reinforce learning!
And one more thing that I loved: a video on focussing learner attention with rolling goals, i.e. always having a couple of goals available for the learner to choose from; maybe instead of giving them a list where they pick the order in which they do stuff, giving them a handful of goals and as soon as one is completed, it is replaced with a new one, so that it remains interesting and an incentive to finish something boring to see what opens up next.
But of course, many of the ideas above require a learning platform that can do these things, and probably also learners who do this as a (mandatory?) one-off training, not people who want to be able to bookmark a video to share with colleagues or return to themselves. Which clashes with what we want for our MOOC, where we don’t want to funnel learners through a set learning path but let them freely explore, and where it is important that it is easy to find — and hopefully share — resources. So now my challenge is to figure out how to include high relevance, low cost game elements in the MOOC…
Very interesting combination of sunny day but a lot of fog (and a dirty lens on my phone…)
Every weather is beach weather! :-)
