Using Intelligent Agents and Gamification for Professional Development

 

Most every college online learning department in the US sparsely staffed given the tasks they is expected of them. While faculty are experts in their field of study, instructional design is separate field and it cannot be assumed that all faculty have this training.  This knowledge is critical for the professional development of the faculty and directly affects the accessibility of online course content as well as adopting best practices in teaching and learning, such as regularly reviewing online courses quality.  This become an added burden for understaffed department. Nevertheless, these are necessary are for meeting Middle States Accreditation (Standard III, section 4). 

To make this task tractable, a school using a LMS such as Brightspace, can create a non-termed ‘course’ where faculty can both learn what it is like to be a student in the system and participate in a self-paced training to improve the understanding of necessary topics.  By creating a communal professional development space, faculty can autonomous select topics to improve and break down silo’s with strategic online forums. The shared space can also act as repository of tools and OER content that faculty can easily access.

 In the case of SUNY Schenectady, a 5 module self-paced course allowed faculty to select between modules the content they wanted to first focus on.  In order to progress, certain requirements were necessary to advance further in the course.  This allowed modules to provide scaffolded activities.  The modules also provided a quantifiable space that required about the same about of effort to complete while each module illustrated Universal Design for Learning principles in an attempt to teach by example.

The true challenge to professional development is getting faculty to participate in the training.  To do this we had three incentives:

1. Learning outcomes for each module included building assets that the faculty could use in their courses.  Often these assets employed strategies that would increase student engagement and reduce faculty effort. 
2. Gamified modules offered badges for completing sections.   By design it encouraged or lead learners to produce more or complete the course
3. Certificates – were set up through an automated system (Awards).  Faculty would received personalized and dated certificates for not only completing the courses, but for completing each module.   This would allow for learners to use their work in each module to generate measured evidence (a certificate).  These illustrate a quantifiable amount of work  and the learners can share the certificates with their supervisors as evidence of the professional development in the annual review. For those without Adobe PDF Pro, a generic certificate can also work,
   
   

Automated Enrollment

Using Intelligent Agents in Brightspace, the system can identify all those with a specific roll, such as Faculty, and enroll them into a class.  With a little forethought, the school can enroll all employees in a “Staff” role that can be upgraded to “Faculty” if they teach.  This will allow all members of school to have access to the training area to promote topics with ubiquitous applications, such as “Accessibility”.  With the two roles, an Intelligent Agent can easily enroll all those working at the campus.   Naturally, this can be expanded with new modules and even become a single place for the school’s professional development

Gamification: 2 Learning as Improving

Shedding a Traditional Approach to Assessments

It is the first day of class and students enter the course with a dread of failure.  Usually homework and learning opportunities offer only one chance to define their grade which will be more damning and permanent than Hester’s scarlet letter. 

This is often not a fault of faculty being lazy. They simply do not have the time to make the work better and afford students multiple attempts - effectively offering the students a chance to improve. Nevertheless, this results in students dreading assignments and fearing failure.

As an alternative, we should view failure as an opportunity for students to assess the situation and progress. One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s line in chapter one of his autobiography:

‘A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do,
never does all he can.’

Learning should be thought of as a way to improve and one does this through multiple attempts.  If you do not succeed at first, you try again – often using different strategies to learn how to solve a problem.

Discouraging students from trying new solutions, even though some may fail, is doing them, and ourselves, a great disservice. If we adopt the mindset that students should have the opportunity to experiment and explore solutions, we may not only find that they will be more open to try harder problems but that we are fostering creative problem solvers.  This requires that we consider creating learning activities that allow for multiple attempts.  These attempts will offer opportunities to assess and improve.

This is one of the keys to the success of the gaming industry.  Gamers recognize that they will fail in their attempts.  They also know that if they keep focused, try multiple times, and often have to think innovatively, they can overcome the challenge. The ability to save progress or use a reset button is not a coincidence. It allows for multiple attempts to test various strategies.

By allowing students to participate in learning activities multiple times so that they can improve their skills, we are fostering a non-defeatist mentality that will benefit our students. Students can explore options, review feed back and see how the lessons they choose to adopt directly affects their success.

We are also mirroring actual learning environments where people must experiment with strategies to determine which will succeed and to learning from their mistake. 

Another important feature of viewing Learning as improving, is that we are encouraging a sense of agency in the students.  Their decisions matter and what learning strategies they employ will directly affect their success.  This will contribute to their success both as a student and as a person.

So when designing your learning activities and assessments, consider offer more time and allowing multiple attempts.  The results may surprise you.

Gamification: Introduction

For thousands of years we have used games to teach us important skills for the real world.  For example, Chess is over a thousand years old and it some of the lessons it teaches includes:

• strategic thinking,
• planning,
• decisions have consequences, and
• the how leaders need to assign importance to their team

The value of play is so deeply rooted in evolution, that other species such as cats also adopt it as a means to develop needed skills.  Ironically for the main part of the past hundred years, play has been viewed as antithetical to education. Instead classrooms were designed liked factories to where students are given top-down instruction to impart skills necessary for working menial, and often repetitive, industrial jobs.

Recently games and simulations have become rediscovered resources to assist higher education (Chacon, Chen, & Wolf, 2007).  In 2003, Nick Pelling coins the term gamification and it has been growing since, offering successful teaching strategies and increasing engagement (Werbach & Hunter, 2012).  What is gamification?

Gamification is using the principles of play, such as games, to make real world activities more engaging.

I will briefly touch base on three aspects of gamification and in another blog post offer advice on implementing them. They are:

1. Learning as Improving
2. Agency
3. Grading

Each of these aspects can redefine a traditional class and benefit the students.