Author: Laura Cira

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Improving Student Success with Gameful Learning Concepts

Gameful learning is a take on instructional design that incorporates many of the best motivators of games and play. It applies the powerful psychological factors of play to influence student motivation, provides choice in how to accomplish learning goals, and changes the fundamental way students are assessed. These changes don’t make easy play out of scholarly work; rather, they give students a new focus while accomplishing that work.

A gameful course is often fundamentally different in its grading structure. Traditional courses tend to start with an assumed ‘A’ that can dip or dive depending on a student’s success from week to week. With grade maintenance their primary goal, students are less likely to take a chance and risk a short-term failure. But risk-taking is often necessary in learning. Gameful courses, on the other hand, start students at zero and they work up from there, making every gradable object a move in the right direction. This approach allows students the room to take chances along the way and to extend themselves, as they are given multiple chances to prove their competence rather than relying on sustaining a fluctuating grade as their goal.

Gameful learning often creates a greater sense of ownership for students as they make choices and take chances on their path through the course. Instructors curate selections for students, who may, for example, choose several small formative quizzes to master concepts, or opt for a harder challenge quiz to skip smaller units and move ahead. These choices can allow students to move forward until they reach material that requires more effort, keeping them engaged and, in many cases, highly motivated.

The biggest reward for students, in the long run, is a greater sense of purpose in their course work. Recasting the focus from busywork and fluctuating grades throughout the semester, gameful learning applies another layer of purpose by encouraging students to reach the next level of achievement, constantly moving toward an ultimate goal of demonstrated competence.

Further reading can be done by visiting the University of Michigan’s Gameful Pedagogy site.

http://www.gamefulpedagogy.com/what-is-gameful/

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Call for Faculty Stories: Mango Languages

Mango Languages is a language-learning software which teaches practical conversation and valuable cultural insight for new languages. Using an encouraging, conversational style, Mango offers 70+ languages, including many which are less commonly taught such as Haitian Creole, Cherokee, Punjabi and Thai. Mango Languages is available free to all ND faculty, staff and students.

Perin Gurel, assistant professor of American studies and concurrent assistant professor of gender studies, recently took advantage of Mango. “I was interested in learning Farsi because my research involves Iran,” says Gurel. “I found Mango really easy to manage and enjoyable. I like that it had the Farsi script in addition to the sounds (unlike other paid learning software, such as Pimsleur). I recommended it to one more person who is using it for Turkish. It seems to be working well for him, especially the focus on pronunciation.”

Now it’s your turn: If you’re a faculty member who uses Mango and has found it valuable for your teaching or your research, we would love to hear from you and include your story in an future edition of this newsletter. Questions can be directed to the Center the Study of Languages & Cultures via email at cslcstaf@nd.edu, phone 574.631.5881 or visit the CSLC at 329 DeBartolo Hall.

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5 Things to Consider When Creating Digital Content

youtu.be/46ui-mPLR7I

Thinking about creating your own multimedia to provide students with new and improved content? It’s a worthy undertaking, but there are smart ways of approaching this and ways that can lead to inefficiencies and frustrations. If you’re game for the former and not keen on the the latter, take some time to think through the suggestions made by Laurie Kirkner, director of the Office of Digital Learning, in the following video.

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Moreau FYE: Transforming Learning through Analytics

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpSTPU1nErs

The Moreau First Year Experience (FYE) program was created in 2015 to give students a smooth transition from high school to college life at Notre Dame. All incoming freshmen, placed in small groups across 115 individual sections, cover important topics that range from cultural competency and well-being to healthy relationships and academic success.

Because it was new, program creators and course designers wanted to keep an eye on the course to make sure the content was meaningful, so that students would engage with it and not just survive their first weeks of college, but flourish.

Moreau course materials are delivered through Sakai and give students a visually attractive layout with an organized workflow, providing every class section the same experience. They are structured around weekly topics which include essays and videos presented as a flipped-classroom experience. Students study the weekly material, then write and submit reflections prior to the in-class discussion, enabling them to discuss the topic on a deeper level.

Creating a sweeping course with the breadth of topics it covers took the work of many people. “One of the really groundbreaking things about Moreau is that it’s a very active partnership between the academic unit of First Year of Studies and the Division of Student Affairs,” explains Maureen Dawson, assistant dean in the First Year of Studies and FYE co-director. Dawson, along with Paul Manrique, program director for New Student Engagement and FYE co-director, worked with instructional designers and learning data scientists to curate and build the FYE course sites in Sakai.

Manrique appreciated glimpses into the learning and program impact that the course’s design has offered. “Sakai allows us to use a week-by-week analysis of where students are,” says Manrique, “ensuring that they’re reviewing material, allowing them to reflect, almost in a diary, on the materials and how they’ve progressed as a student from the fall or the beginning of the semester.”

The FYS course creators collaborated with the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning to make the course sites not only an effective learning tool for students, but also a predictive tool for student success. Instructional designer Kevin Abbott and Alex Ambrose, Kaneb’s digital learning analyst, built the Sakai sites to output data based on student activity that answers questions about how students actually engage with the content.

Ambrose explains it this way. “We were able to pull lots of data on how the students were watching videos, how they were reflecting on the ePortfolios, the Google analytics of clicking on different readings, and we were able to see a new layer—a new view of the learning that wasn’t able to be seen before because the students are coming in this portal and we’re capturing their experience.”

“The challenge that we had,” notes Ambrose, “was how do we effectively engage all 2000 students in this one-credit course, and how do we efficiently scale and support over 115 instructors across all these different sections?” They realized they could improve student outcomes if they reviewed and responded to the data. “Not just to administer and manage the learning,” Ambrose explains, “but to transform the learning.”

Dawson noted that the wide variety of skills on the Moreau team, which included those with backgrounds in teaching theory and technology, produced a valuable look at how students learn. “We saw that if articles and videos are too long the viewership, the readership drops off. So very early on we started to understand that there’s a sweet spot for length of readings and length of videos and that’s really all thanks to the analytical research of our colleagues in Kaneb and OIT.”

The size of the Moreau program meant there was a large amount of data from course site activity. “Never have we had such a large group—a pool of 2100 students—to base our observations on,” says Ambrose. Moving forward, there were real questions to answer. “How could we create a digital learning environment, how could we help with the course design, how could we help with the assessment design to make sure that the course was achieving the goals and the outcomes that it set out to do, and that we could actually measure that and make sure it was accomplishing those goals.”

As the course has matured, designers now understand their data is not only valuable in tweaking the course for greater student engagement, but that it can also be used to recognize if a student is falling behind, and that a student’s struggles with the Moreau course could be indicative of larger struggles in their first year. According to Kevin Barry, director of the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and member of the original Moreau design team, it was this emphasis on developing the capacity to assist students within the first three to five weeks that has made the program so special.

“One of the exciting take-aways from this project,” says Ambrose, “is that we know how to set up the back end architecture…to really be able to start serving other large courses like the chemistries, the bios, the calcs, the physics,  the intro to engineerings, intro to philosophy, to theology  – these  courses on our campus that many students go through. How can we set up assignments that are not just efficient but that are also effective and really help students learn earlier, sooner, better? That’s the big take-away for me – that we have some lessons to be shared, particularly to the large scale courses on campus.”

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Enhancing Sakai with LTI

youtu.be/tsxnQhTykK4

Professor Holly Goodson had been teaching large sections of chemistry and biochemistry at Notre Dame for several years. She’d struggled with communicating with so large a number of students. “One of the most challenging aspects of teaching a large class is figuring out how to make personal connections with the students,” says Goodson. She found that frequent collaboration and communication with large classes and multiple groups couldn’t always be handled in Sakai and definitely couldn’t be controlled with email alone. Coordinating meeting times, project drafts, and answering hundreds of student questions would quickly overwhelm an instructor or TA.

Then Holly heard about Piazza from a colleague. Designed originally as an anonymous forum tool, Piazza now handles most of the communication needs for Holly and her TAs, giving everyone an established way to communicate between multiple instructors, students and student groups, no matter the scale.

In her large class, students go to Piazza to post and answer one another’s questions anonymously. For smaller, more collaborative classes, Holly provides group folders where students post project work and receive feedback on projects as they develop. “It ends up being quite efficient,” notes Goodson. “Everybody can see what’s going on, nobody has to find anything in their email, you can immediately go to Piazza and find it, and it’s actually been quite useful.”

Most important to Goodson was Piazza’s integration with Sakai. As a third party tool created and managed outside of Sakai, Goodson initially began using it independent of Notre Dame’s learning management system. Her many students needed to set up independent accounts, resulting in problems when students didn’t remember their logins or had multiple accounts from semester to semester, making them hard to keep track of. Then Holly worked with Sakai administrator Laura Gekeler, who helped her integrate the Piazza app with Sakai so that users have quick access using their Notre Dame credentials. “Now it’s just like anything else in Sakai, so there’s link to the Gradebook, there’s a link to the Resources, and there’s a link to Piazza. It’s seamless,” says Goodson.