Reflection 4: One step forward and two steps back

Once again, the week has focused on reflection, planning, and assessing...and starting over...somewhat.... 


Designing a course is time-consuming and requires a great deal of thought and planning to design a good course.

Add the need to find appropriate readings and develop one's own content.......


Then top this off with gamifying the same course, and the need for organization and planning more than triples......



... Along with the need to frequently stop and regroup.....

 
During this week we decided to abandon the idea of finding a textbook that met our needs and offered the content we want to use.

We started "playing" (i.e., reading and reviewing) the narrative for flow and "fit."

 We decided to create our own content, integrated peer-reviewed research.
 
We decided to identify several learning objectives for each "town."

We decided to try to create a frame game of some type within each town.

Each of these decisions, however, requires further consideration.

While finding a text that fits our needs would be ideal, doing so does not seem possible.  One possibility looks only at gamification from the business perspective, alluding very briefly to gamification in education.  Another promising text provides some of the content we need but then disintegrates into a series of interviews and examples all of which were K-12. A third text we considered addressed gamification in higher education but not in an online setting. Perhaps we should simply write our own text...

Playing/Reading/Reviewing our own course is important, so we will be adding ourselves to the course as students as a way to test  our our work. The narrative will continue to need refinement, but that is to be expected.

As this is a graduate level course, rigor and scholarship are important. While we could prepare all of our own content ourselves, we want to integrate peer-reviewed research supporting our work.  Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research does not exist for some of the course content, and we also want to include application research. Integrating these three concepts - without overwhelming the students - will prove an interesting quest for us.

Learning objectives are important guides for a course but deciding where and how to weave them into the various "towns" has resulted in some unusual ideas. I have toyed with crafting a Mayor for each township to introduce the objectives, but that has not felt "right." At this point I have added the into the introductory narrative for each town, but that may well change. Repetition increases comfort so I feel I should introduce the objectives the same way in each town...but the approach may well change.

Assessing learning is important, and one of our goals with this course is to model gamification in all areas...so....we are now considering ways to have students interact with content other than through reading and participating in forums.  We want easy to understand activities that students could adapt to their own needs later.  One concern is that Java does not function well within Canvas, so we will either need to create java-free activities..or...java-rich activities that can be housed outside of Canvas. We could use a variety of free websites to house our activities so choosing the best format is necessary.

What's next?

More of the same....

My goal is to finish Histoire: I have a few items to scan, content to create, several readings to incorporate, and activities to plan and create.

This should be fun!