Drawing this all together - decision time!

and...the finale......and my decision...

Drawing This All Together 

The MDA Format allows users to recycle and retune and integrates well with online presence. Key here is the MDA’s iterative approach to design and tuning, allowing instructors and designers to reason about particular design goals and to anticipate how changes will impact each aspect of the framework, the resulting designs / implementations, student engagement, and course learnings. Moving between MDA’s three levels of abstraction allows us to conceptualize the dynamic behavior of game systems as well as that of interactive, gamified online courses. The following graphic  depicts the flow of course development using the MDA format for game design:

In some ways, instructors/course designers need to work on all three areas of MDA at once, while keeping in mind the components of online presence as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as they design. In some instances the aesthetics might inform dynamics and mechanics, but it may not be possible to actually design the class presentation or appearance without knowing the mechanics (the rules and resources) to use, and the mechanics both spring from and lead to the dynamics (the activity that occurs).  All of this leads to the student’s experience of aesthetics (components of engagement). 

The complexity of course design, i.e., integration of gamification, can vary from the course site being a place just to spend time while students interact generally with content to having more of a social framework where students interact with one another along with content, to full immersion using a narrative. The MDA framework not only serves to inform game design, it also informs course design during gamification, providing course designers/instructors with a method of decision-making and validating these decisions while enhancing the course. Aligning gamification with the three presences noted in the Community of Inquiry gives designers and instructors an additional framework to further validate their decisions. Syncing these two frameworks, then, provides instructors and designers with a more solid approach to both designing and validating the learning outcomes while making a course while increasing engagement. Further application of both frameworks allows for course evolution and future enhancements.

So....what shall I do?   What are my next steps ?
 

References

Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004, July). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Workshops/2004/WS-04-04/WS04-04-001.pdf  

Gamification, MDA, and CoI...and the literature review continues....

It appears as though the MDA framework can be used to design a gaming experience, and a successful  online course integrates Garrison's Community of Inquiry....but will they all work together to gamify an online course?

Integrating Gamification as per MDA Framework into the Community of Inquiry 

Although the Community of Inquiry framework was created to analyze online asynchronous communications, it is now being applied to other online settings. Harteveld, ten Thij, & Copier (2011) note that although many players play games individually, many more play collaboratively, tackling difficult problems and engaging with each other cross-culturally both within games and outside of games through game forums and wikis, even in-game and real-life meetings. Hudson and Cairns (2016) found that when teams lose a digital game, the negative impact on social presence is greater within teams than it is between teams. Networked interactivity in online educational games is linked to a student’s positive view of learning, test performance, and view of social presence yet no impact on learning outcome achievement (Lee, Jeong, Park, & Ryu,

2011). The Community of Inquiry framework has also been applied to a virtual world. McKerlich and Anderson (2007) observed all three presences in Second Life and concluded that the framework was appropriate to evaluate educational events in MUVE environments and suggested some additional elements such as technical support under teaching presence. Virtual world environments can potentially increase social presence, and in turn cognitive presence. In particular, according to the studies on social presence, the avatars (virtual representations of individuals) are likely to simulate human-to-human interactions to increase engagement and hence learning (Atkinson, Mayer, & Merrill, 2005). Children playing games such as Alien Rescue have reported learning gains in direct science content knowledge along with related areas of using scientific instruments, managing a budget, conducting research, and applying problem-solving skills (Liu, Rosenblum, Horton, & Kang, 2014).

Missing from the above discussion is a connection between gamified class designs and presence.  The following table depicts the components of the MDA Framework integrated with the three forms of presence:

Although this table is not an exhaustive list, it does serve as a starting point to use when gamifying an online course according to best practices for game design and for online course design.

Next? Drawing together all of these loose ends. . . . and making a decision. . . . . .

References

Atkinson, R. K., Mayer, R. E., & Merrill, M. M. (2005). Fostering social agency in multimedia learning: examining the impact of an animated agent’s voice. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 30, 117–139.

Harteveld, C., ten Thij, M., & Copier, M. (2011). Design for engaging experience and social interaction. Simulation & Gaming 42(5), 590-595.

Hudson, M., & Cairns, P. (2016). The effects of winning and losing on social presence in team-based digital games. Computers in Human Behavior, 60, 1-12.

Lee, K. M., Jeong, E. J., Park, N., & Ryu, S. (2011). Effects of interactivity in educational games: A mediating role of social presence on learning outcomes. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 27(7), 620-633.

Liu, M., Rosenblum, J. A, Horton, L., & Kang, J. (2014). Designing science learning with game-based approaches.  Computers in the Schools, 31(1/2), 84-102.

 McKerlich, R., & Anderson, T. (2007). Community of inquiry and learning in immersive environments. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(4), 35–52.