Gamifying ELOs

A popular trend in education in the last few years (may have been around longer but I'm only in my 7th year of being a teacher) is the concept of essential learning outcomes or ELOs.  These ELOs are meant to be the most essential things a student should learn when they pass a class.  Ideally, from what I've learned from pro-d days, staff meetings and department meetings, is that each class should only have a small handful of ELOs that the teacher can focus on.

To put it in some more context, the BC government publishes documents that have a number of prescribed learning outcomes (PLOs).  In some cases there can be as many as 100 prescribed learning outcomes for a single course.  Each PLO basically amounting to a particular piece of discreet knowledge or a particular skill.  The ELO approach is meant to compress all these pieces into smaller broader outcomes.

A good example is trigonometry in junior high grades.  The PLOs have learning each trig ratio as a separate outcome and then each type of problem as their own outcome as well.  When learning trigonometry (at a junior high level at least) it really can be boiled down learning SOHCAHTOA and applying it to several problems.  So the ELO would just be the ability to apply SOHCAHTOA to a variety of problems.  Seems silly to be honest as we're just repackaging the same material but oh well.

Anyways, how can I use this in my own efforts to gamify my classes?  Well I first realized that the ELOs are basically the minimum amount of mastery needed to complete a course and, ideally, be successful in the next course.  So meeting the ELOs would be my pass requirement, or rank D if you will (for those not familiar with Asian games, rank D is generally the lowest level of success).  In order to get to rank S (the highest) the student would have to complete increasingly difficult assignments but the difference would be these assignments would be optional.  In many games getting the higher ranks is entirely optional but usually gave the player perks or prestige or some other reward.

It would require a change in my thinking of students and I'd have to be ok with students being content sitting at rank D (and there are a lot of them).  I might post a public leaderboard to show where students sit using rankings instead of actual grades.  This might not be allowed despite the students sharing their grades with each other anyways.  I never understood this as if someone is embarrassed by their grade, they can work harder to get a better one so they aren't as embarrassed so why not show everyone's grade?

The other issue is how much work would be needed to achieve a rank D?  It has to be enough that the rank D students can't finish it too quickly, but it can't be too much that the rank S students have no time to do the rank S stuff.

Things to think about before I get back to a classroom.

Gamifying my Classes

Let's start with a video

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamifying-education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDLw1zIc94

I thought this was a great video, albeit hardly scientific or pedagogically sound but interesting nonetheless.  Really hits home with me as I am a gamer through and through and anything to make my classes more interesting/fun for me is always good (I can't control whether students have fun or not so if I can make my classes fun for me at least someone wins).  This concept of gamifying eduation has always been in the back of my mind since I saw this video about a year ago and I've sort of implemented some aspects of it in my classes (See Arocena Cup).

This year I've had the 'fortune' of working at EBUS Academy, the school district's online distance learning school.  Being at an online distance learning school has removed the need to make course material as the school seems to purchase the courses from other parties (part of my enjoyment of teaching is in developing my own course materials so this was kind of strange to get used to) and also the need to directly teach students as the course materials included fairly comprehensive tutorial videos.  This freed up a lot of time to do marking, lots and lots of marking as all my classes tend to have lots and lots of students.

However, all that marking does have some benefits.  For one I can listen to a lot of music while marking.  Admittedly that got boring after a while so I moved on to podcasts.  At first it was gaming podcasts like http://trinityforcepodcast.com/ and http://www.critjuice.com/ but I quickly listened to all those episodes.  So I moved on to education stuff and ran into this https://www.coursera.org/course/videogameslearning

I signed up and have been listening to their videos for the past few days and it's got me thinking of how I can revamp my classes to be more enjoyable to teach and hopefully more engaging and interesting for the students; though mainly those students who aren't normally engaged.  The good students are always engaged no matter what I do.  In some cases a trained monkey clicking through slides would be just fine for those students.

My first step is going to be figuring out a proper XP system that incorporates delivery of course content as well as the assignments and tests associated with that course content.