Gamification has been shown to improve student learning (Brull, 2016), and one of the best apps for facilitating gamification in the classroom is Mural, an online collaborative whiteboard with hundreds of engaging, colorful activity templates. It is one of my favorite teaching and learning tools
Picture this: Days before your semester begins, your students are messaging each other about how excited they are to begin your class. Then, during the semester, they show up to every lesson curious about what they’re going to learn that day, even enthusiastic about doing
Faculty are forever looking for ways to improve performance, and a recent article by Xiao and Hew (2023) explores the possibility of using rewards to do so.
The learning management system (LMS) discussion forum comes off as archaic and overly controlling to today’s students, who are used to working in a much richer social media environment. Whereas the LMS forum is designed for lengthy text comments, young people are used to
Collaborative problem solving is an active learning strategy that promotes a richer understanding of course content, application, and significance than traditional lecture-based pedagogy. When students participate in collaborative problem solving, they not only learn course content, but they also practice critical process skills, including information
In the fall of 2017, Niki Bray had a problem. The University of Memphis instructor and instructional designer was tasked with redesigning and teaching an Intro to Kinesiology course that had failure rates of 43 percent on the first attempt and nearly 50 percent on
Student engagement, performance, and retention in online education are major concerns for higher education administrators. Wake Technical Community College improved all three with its Operation Graduating Gilbert (OGG) course that adopts a story design and gamification format to build a more engaging experience for the
The power of games as learning devices is well established, but transforming course content into an actual game is a huge undertaking. After all, gaming companies spend millions of dollars developing each game. A better approach is to incorporate gaming elements into regular course activities.
Gamification of learning has become a hot topic in education as of late. But instructors are understandably puzzled about how to gamify their courses. Should they just add a Jeopardy PowerPoint to one of their modules, or do something else?
A few years ago I was struck by a question: What makes students so motivated to engage in “work” doing tasks in video games, yet at the same time so regularly unmotivated to do work in class that could actually benefit them and their careers?
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