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Heather Young Mandujano, Cuyahoga Community College
Rebecca Wiggins, Cuyahoga Community College
Key Statement: Learn how to use game elements and strategies to build immersive, on-demand learning experiences that are as entertaining as they are effective.
Keywords: Gamification, Immersion, Faculty Development
Introduction
The way we live and work has changed dramatically since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have re-evaluated priorities and found ways to be more efficient in our everyday lives. Many of us have chosen to keep the changes we made to live more slowly, but we still want services available to us anytime, anywhere, on-demand and customized to our needs and preferences. These shifts in society have resulted in an even greater need to meet learners where they are and create experiences that stand out among competing priorities (Ramírez-Montoya et al., 2021). This is true for both faculty and students.
Gamification is one strategy that can be used to engage learners. This article details a specific example in which instructional designers created a gamified workshop for faculty, but the game elements described can apply to any teaching and learning scenario. For example, faculty could include a points-based leaderboard based on homework scores or use adaptive release rules inside their LMS to make content available to students only after they have achieved a goal. In the faculty development realm, a badging system could be used to reward faculty for achieved credentials, attendance, or certifications. Or, an entire workshop could be gamified by creating friendly competition and implementing a method of scoring points as learning objectives are achieved.
What Is Assessment Safari?
The Instructional Design Team at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C®) was tasked with creating training for faculty that would encourage a shift toward authentic assessment (Silverman et al., 2021). This shift was initiated by the need to move away from expensive online proctoring services, but it has become even more necessary as faculty grapple with the realities of AI tools like ChatGPT.
We decided to create an on-demand workshop that could be completed by our faculty anytime and anywhere. However, just teaching about assessment types and giving examples would be dry. How could we make learning about assessment fun and engaging? We decided to take an exploratory, hands-on, and learner-directed approach. Inspired by a map from an early 1990s Nintendo game, we created an immersive, on-demand training that uses gamification elements and allows faculty to make decisions in real time that impact the outcomes of their learning.
On the Assessment Safari journey, faculty collaborate with a Safari Guide who accompanies them through four worlds of assessment (see Figure 1). Each world focuses on a different type of assessment (formative, summative, alternative, and authentic) and is modeled after a region of Africa. Faculty interact with animal experts in each world to learn more about assessment types, unlock bonus content and use their knowledge to help rescue the Safari Guide from impending doom (being eaten by a vicious animal, see Figure 2). To complete the Safari, faculty must demonstrate their assessment expertise to win the Safari Showdown trivia game.
Figure 1. The Four Worlds of Assessment.
Figure 2. Drag and Drop Chase Game.
Meet the Team
Three members of Tri-C’s Instructional Design and Learning Excellence Team collaborated on this project:
Heather Young Mandujano, a senior instructional designer, served as the team lead and project manager. She is credited with the out-of-the-box idea of using cartoon animals to help faculty improve their assessments. She designed the objectives, content and assessment questions, conducted most of the research and developed a storyboard and other resources to guide the creation of the training.
Rebecca Wiggins, who was the instructional technologist when this project was being built, is our resident Articulate Storyline expert. For those unfamiliar with Articulate Storyline, it is an eLearning authoring software that allows users to create interactive multimedia presentations and training. Rebecca was responsible for building the Safari, making it work and developing the gamification ideas used in this project.
Steve Ahern, an instructional support specialist, has a graphic design background and created all the artwork for the project. He designed five immersive worlds based on images from Africa, created a dozen custom animals for faculty to interact with and developed a branded Jeep and boat to move our Safari Guide from place to place.
Developing the Safari
The initial idea behind this project was to make learning about assessment more interesting for faculty through a virtual safari. The training was created using the backward design model, starting with objectives and assessment questions, and then building the content into a storyboard. The plan was for the Safari to be composed of four “worlds” where the learner would interact with animals to learn about each type of assessment, with the completion of one world unlocking the next until the learner reaches the final challenge.
However, it became clear early in the development process that clicking on animals for content was cute but a bit boring. The format also limited how deeply content could be covered. The first solution was to create a series of bonus videos that unlock once the learner interacts with all the animals in each world. The bonus videos take a deeper dive into the different types of assessment, examining the particular application of and challenges facing each one.
In addition to the bonus videos, the second strategy used to increase learner engagement was introducing several game elements into the training. The team’s research indicated that including game elements creates a more captivating training that holds the learners’ interest and increases motivation. The specific game elements incorporated include immersion, decisions, goals, and challenges (Landers et al., 2019; Pozzi et al., 2016). Watch this video to learn how each of these elements is utilized in Assessment Safari.
The adjustments made to incorporate bonus videos and game elements were worthwhile. After adding those elements, we did a soft launch of Assessment Safari to correct any technical issues and collect feedback. Based on the comments we received (see Fig. 3), our participants were engaged and acquired valuable information. However, the additional workload created by the bonus videos and game elements contributed to our second issue: the development of Assessment Safari took three times longer than we anticipated.
Figure 3. Faculty Feedback
In retrospect, there are a couple of ways that better planning in the beginning could have cut down the development time. It would have been beneficial to decide to include the game elements earlier in the process. Although the team’s flexibility in changing the plan paid off, a lot of work had to be redone to accommodate the additions, including reworking assessments, changing the flow of the training and requesting additional graphics.
The artwork requests are especially significant because the most time-consuming aspect of this project turned out to be the creation of graphics. While including original designs in this project makes it more cohesive and fun, those elements take a long time to make. Also, since the interactive elements of the training were built using the animal images as clickable hot spots or animated features and the videos included the animal characters, work was often paused to wait for additional graphics. In retrospect, front-loading the graphics creation so they were ready earlier in the process would have significantly reduced our development time.
Next Game
We intend to be more thorough in the early planning stages of future projects. While it would be almost impossible to anticipate everything, if we spent a little more time thinking through the project and making decisions early rather than as we worked, we could have avoided the problems that ate our time. However, it is also important to remember that flexibility is key to making a project like this work. So, we recommend using the planning process to really think through your project, anticipate issues, and front-load time-consuming tasks while remaining open to innovative ideas that can improve your project as they come up.
Discussion Questions
To what extent do you enjoy games? Describe one or two things that make games interesting for you.
Reflect on your most engaging experience as a learner. What do you think made that experience so engaging?
Think about a recent lesson or training that you taught or experienced as a learner. How may game elements (immersion, decisions, goals, and challenges) have been used to make it more engaging?
References
Landers, R. N., Auer, E. M., Helms, A. B., Marin, S., & Armstrong, M. B. (2019). Gamification of adult learning: Gamifying employee training and development. Cambridge University Press eBooks (pp. 271–295). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108649636.012
Pozzi, F., Persico, D., Collázos, C. A., Dagnino, F. M., & Jurado Munoz, J. L. (2016). Gamifying teacher professional development: An experience with collaborative learning design. Interaction Design and Architecture(s), 29, 76–92. https://doi.org/10.55612/s-5002-029-004
Ramírez-Montoya, M. S., Andrade-Vargas, L., Rivera-Rogel, D., & Portuguez-Castro, M. (2021). Trends for the future of education programs for professional development. Sustainability, 13(13), 7244. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137244
Silverman, S., Caines, A., Casey, C., Garcia de Hurtado, B., Riviere, J., Sintjago, A., & Vecchiola, C. (2021). What happens when you close the door on remote proctoring? Moving toward authentic assessments with a people-centered approach. To Improve the Academy, 39(3). https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.17063888.0039.308
About the Authors
