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.