Games design and learning design

This isn't one of those blog posts about how learning could be much better if it was more like a computer game. It's a blog post about how learning DESIGN could be much better if it was more like computer games DESIGN.

I have long seen an analogy between designing games and desgning learning materials. In both cases, your goal is to give your user a good experience - yet you have no direct control over what they actually do with your materials. This analogy is particularly strong with "adventure games", which are based more on puzzles and exploration than on fast reactions and accuracy of hand-eye coordination.

I was reminded of this again through an article by Aaron Connors, the co-author of the highly-respected Tex Avery series of games and a strong proponent of story-centric gaming. Just try substituting "learning" for "game" in these extracts to see how well the analogy applies.

"When you boil game design down to the atomic level ... it’s pretty basic: Create an obstacle for the player. Give them the means to overcome it. Repeat. That’s it."
"[During the 1990s] too much focus was put on the technology. Often, some new innovation was enough to sell an otherwise miserable game."

"The two things casual gamers hate are frustration and confusion. And many of the “classic” adventure games were not only frustrating and confusing, they banked on it to extend gameplay. It may be an oversimplification, but in some respects, casual games could be adventure games with the frustration and confusion removed. In other words, take out the aimless wandering with no idea what (if anything) there is to find; always try to make certain the player knows what the current objective is."

"Better pacing, less navel-gazing, and I also think it’s a great idea to reduce frustration and confusion. We don’t have to get rid of them altogether – that’s what multiple levels of difficulty are for – but we can’t make games that rely on obscurity and repetition to pad game length. Some of you may love games where you’re free to get lost, stuck, annoyed, etc. – but you’re in the vast minority. Most people want games that are accessible, scalable to their skill level, intuitive, and fun. They want to be able to get in and out easily and do something satisfying without making a huge time commitment."
Convinced? I hope so. I don't know how useful this analogy will be in practice though, except to those of us used to thinking about games design, because the sad fact - often overlooked by those who want to make their course materials more like computer games - is that designing a good game is no easier than designing a good course. As Aaron Connors comments: "Have you noticed how seldom you hear well-known game designers criticizing other designers’ work? It’s because we know how tough it is to make a really great game."

Audio assignments for students?

A previous post (Audio feedback on written assignments) listed a few examples of tutors giving feedback to students in audio form. (Collective feedback, as a podcast to an entire class, is common; individual audio feedback is rarer and I think more interesting.)

I've since found out that in my own faculty (Education and Language Studies) tutors on the language courses give audio feedback quite regularly - which should not be surprising: these being distance learning courses, students make audio recordings to practice their language productive skills, so it's natural for tutors to give feedback in the same medium.

But reading about some highly successful podcasts by a philosophy lecturer at Glasgow made me wonder whether this model of spoken-assignment, spoken-feedback could be extended further. Why are these podcasts so popular? Of course, it may just be that she's a brilliant lecturer. But there's another possible reason, to do with the nature of philosophy itself: that it's a discipline which is practiced through language. To do philosophy is to talk. One can do philosophy through writing, of course, but talking is the original technology through which philosophy was created, and through which its business (the persuasive engagement of another soul) is most intimately conducted.

If it were not for the traditions of the modern university, which since about 1800 have based their systems of assessment on written examinations, we might place more value on the spoken production of language. Philosophy is just one discipline where we might reasonably expect students to be able not only to think and write persuasively but to speak persuasively. Management is another (eg the team briefing, the strategy presentation, the three-minute business case to the Board). In fact, most professional disciplines have a communicative and persuasive component, which in practical situations is more often conducted in speech than in writing. Perhaps it's time that our assessment methods reflected this?

Online collaborative work for beginners

We seem to have realised, at last, that one cannot simply provide online collaborative technology to students and expect them to collaborate. (One of the most interesting findings from the JISC Great Expectations survey was that although young people may be experienced in social networking technology, on arrival at university they struggle to see how it can be used in learning.) So how should one introduce online collaborative work to students? What kinds of scaffolding and support do beginning students need?
I've just come across a paper (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online) by Andy Northedge, author of The Good Study Guide, describing how he and colleagues designed "a fail-safe online group project work environment" for students on an entry level Open University course in health and social care (KZX100). A high degree of structuring to tasks, supported by custom online software, meant that after an initial set-up stage student teams could work largely independently with little teacher support. Satisfaction levels were high, and - most remarkably - students were actually interested in each others' work. (This happens much more rarely than teachers suppose!)
The key features of the learning design were as follows.
(1) A highly structured team set-up stage. This addressed the critical issue for all collaborative work: that students need to be doing their work at roughly the same time - not trivial to arrange with distance learning students, for whom flexibility of study is often critical. Students began by indicating their availability during a six-week period, after which their tutor divided them into teams who could work on the project during the same two-week block. A coordinator in each team then obtained students' commitment to precise start and end dates. Importantly, students received credit for tasks in this stage, even before actually doing any work on their project, "to stimulate them to participate in a timely way and to commit to the team enterprise". (Without the custom software, other courses could do some of these tasks on Doodle.com - a free public web application for event scheduling.)

(2) Visible time targets for project milestones. These were initially generated by the software, from the start and end dates, but could then be adjusted by coordinators, allowing teams to re-plan their time strategy.

(3) An interface which rendered each student's work visible to other members of their team. Each student had first to find three websites relevant to their chosen concern and review them using an online proforma, and then to review two high-rated and two low-rated websites found by other students. The software displayed students' review of the same website in parallel columns, as well as a "hit parade" of websites in rank order.

(4) Discussion to facilitate the transition from exploration to production. After reviewing the websites, the students used an online forum to discuss six evaluation criteria (breadth, accessibility, trustworthiness, etc), drawing on their experience, and also working towards the joint report which they would next be writing.

(5) Individual authorship of discrete parts of the joint product. Each student wrote a separate section of the final report, summarising the team's discussion of one of the six evaluation criteria. The software only allowed them to work on their own section (or sections), but reading and suggesting improvements to other sections was encouraged.

(6) Assessment not of team product ("to reduce strain on team relations"), but of individual reflective essay on what has been learned from the project.

Although the course has now been superceded, the learning design remains valid. Like the InterLoc tool for structuring online discussion, this is an example of how structure and constraints on action can be useful in a teaching environment, as scaffolding to help students attain a level they would have found it difficult to reach on their own - in contradiction to the freedom ethos of Web 2.0.

(The full reference of the paper: Northedge A, 2006. Designing a fail-safe online group project work environment, Proceedings of International Conference on e-Learning: Learning Theories vs. Technologies, 14–16 December, 2006, Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, pp 12.1-7)

Audio feedback on written assignments

A colleague has just asked me whether I know of any courses where students get feedback to their written assignments in audio form - either as audio annotations to the document or a separate audio file.

I remembered hearing about people trying this, but I couldn't put my finger on any specific instances. There are none in my own faculty, as far as I can establish. The Open University's Cloudworks website includes some notes form people trying it at Athabasca University (Canada), Marietta College (USA), and Sheffield Hallam (UK) - but not the OU itself!

A quick check turned up some people at Staffordshire University using it in biosciences (August 2007), and a just-finished JISC-funded project at Leeds Metropolitan called "Sounds good", reported in The Guardian with a link to the new project website.

Sounds good indeed! They seem to have found some benefits for students, but I'm wondering what it does to the tutor workload. It ought to make it lighter, of course, but things are never so simple.

The enforcement of rational chat

InterLoc (formerly AcademicTalk) is a tool for synchronous online discussion, or chat, which has been specifically designed to force participants to follow the rules of rational academic discussion.

Its creators, Andrew Ravenscroft and Simon McAlister, were responding to concerns about the low levels of online debate - not only in public chatrooms, where dialogue can often take the form of "You suck!" "No, you suck!", but even in organised student discussions, where the tendency is for students to give each other an easy time and resort to "trading" opinions ("I think this." "I think that." "Okay, shall we go for a drink now?")

The InterLoc interface forces participants to start each message with one of a number of prescribed openers, not only to state a position ("I think...", "Let me explain...") but to ask questions ("Why do you think that...?" "Can you give an example...?") and make challenges ("I disagree because...", "An alternative view is...", "How reliable is that evidence...?) Student discussions with InterLoc are found to stay more on topic and go deeper than synchronous discussions conducted without it; in particular, students seem to be more willing to question and challenge each other when socially protected by the formal structure of the system.

Of course this goes directly against the cultural assumptions of freedom and spontaneity associated with online discussion and chat in particular, and some students reported resenting the restrictive openers. But as the authors comment: "It is only by being restrictive in some degree that they will have a positive benefit for the student, by forcing them to reformulate intuitive, reactive thoughts into a more well crafted and, hopefully, thoughtful contribution" (Final report, p. 37)

The InterLoc project's website includes details of publications as well as the latest version of the tool and links to other users. The list of message openers used in the original AcademicTalk is published as an appendix to McAlister, Ravenscroft and Scanlon (2004), "Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC", Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20, pp 194-204.

Techno-fear

People who have to manage information in their job are often worried about the loss of control entailed by new technologies - in particular social media, Web 2.0 etc.

"New technology: the threat to our information" is a wickedly satirical slidecast on this by Norman Lamont. I can't say much about it without spoiling the joke; you'll have to watch it for yourself. (It won't take you more than a couple of minutes.) I'll just say that it's a reflection of how quickly we adapt our expectations and our organisations with the arrival of new technology, and how quickly we forget that we've done so.

The "presenter" of the slidecast is a corporate manager, but the same joke could be done for academics too. My wife recalls a meeting, not so long ago, where the library staff's proposals to make more resources available to students over the internet was met with horror by lecturers, because that would mean that students might read things which they had not read themselves.

Benefits of e-learning: ROI or R&D?

Here's a nice graph, which I found in a JISC report with the compelling title Tangible benefits of e-learning (p.15). The authors used it to categorise their 37 case studies of e-learning in UK universities, and it's very useful to keep the different kinds of potential benefits clear in one's mind.

Here's how they explain the graph:

X Axis – Nature of issue. The x axis of the graph in Figure 1 shows the type of tangible benefit demonstrated and the sort of metrics that can be used to evaluate such benefits…. A well-defined problem such as how to assess large cohorts of students within a tight time-frame can be measured against a very specific and readily quantifiable set of metrics and that it is relatively easy to put accurate figures on time and cost savings. …Towards the middle of the scale we find activities where the intended benefit is to improve learners‟ understanding of a particular subject – in other words a pedagogically-driven change where the tangible benefits can be measured in terms of course or module pass rates or other direct measures of achievement. At the
far end of the scale, we encounter approaches intended to address far ‘softer’ and more complex issues of student engagement. …

Y Axis – e-Approach. The y axis shows how the ‘e-approaches’ differ in nature from those that seek to automate existing practices through those that add increased value by the application of information to those that ultimately seek to transform the learning process. The term ‘informate’ is taken from Zuboff (1988)…. Schein (1989) makes the further distinction between ‘informating down’ whereby control type information is passed downwards and ‘informating up’ whereby those closest to the issues pass information up the chain (in our case upwards from the student to the lecturer). It can thus be seen that the approaches clustered in the bottom left quadrant are those that represent the clearest return on investment (ROI) and it is easily possible to assess their scalability and the value for money represented by further investment. Those in the top right quadrant however are more research and development (R&D) in nature and in their present form may represent overheads without any immediately obvious return.

When you're talking to people about the use of technology in teaching, it can be helpful to clarify whether you're looking at ROI (saving time, effort and money, eg in development, production, revision, administration), R&D (eg virtual worlds, mobile interactivity, "blue skies" technologies), or most likely somewhere in between: improving learning and teaching by making it more engaging, more penetrating and more effective.