Another application of gaming to teaching appears in this course redesign experiment. A course about teaching online has been rethought as if it were a massively multiplayer online game:
There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized by Gong’s description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students’ day-to-day learning experiences.
On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student can develop during the course.
on December 27, 2008 at 2:28 am
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After seeing this post and looking into it a bit more, my colleague and I are seriously considering using this concept in some significant way for a course we’re team-teaching in the Spring (2009) on Immersion Media.
I really love this, because it identifies ways the structure of a game (or “happiness engine” as Jane McGonigal would call it) can be appropriated for thinking about strategies for learning. In several ways, this idea would fall under what many have called “serious games” in that it is using game design and culture to help “players” learn.
I also just like the idea of using the quest/project-based learning structure to de-emphasize the instructor’s role as arbiter of the evaluation process. By giving them a progression of tasks whose successful completion is tied to grades (istead of giving a grade for each task), this concept encourages students to see their grade as ultimately in their own hands, or at least more so than the traditional model.
One quibble: how large is this class? It really needs to be a “massive” size to deserve the title “MMO”; that, and the collaboration needs to take place mostly online, right? I think this concept has more in common with a role-playing-game or RPG (the second half of MMORPG, rather than the first). I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on this, but it seems worthwhile to keep these categories somewhat meaningful for actually describing what is going on in them.
on January 10, 2009 at 2:44 am
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What a neat idea for your spring class, Brett. Can you say more about how it’s going, either here or elsewhere?
Will try to find out more about this post’s class.
on June 3, 2009 at 2:42 am
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[...] “Designing a Class Like a Game” by Bryan Alexander isn’t really addressed to my students. Instead, it just might be a creative and experimental possibility for me to consider when developing a course in the future. [...]