Summer is in swing and that means that we have a new group of TLT Fellows working with us.  By "us", I mean primarily ETS staff, but Cole Camplese and I have been talking about expanding the TLT Fellows to the other units within Teaching and Learning with Technology where it makes sense.

This year is a little different. 

First, I can't really call it the TLT Faculty Fellows program anymore because we have Davis Shaver working with us.  Davis is an undergraduate student who is very interested in ideas like social components of learning management systems, social media, and journalism.  He is the founder of Onward State and a frequent participant at our events.  So when we thought about finding ways to engage students in shaping our services, Davis immediately came to mind.

Second, both Sherry Robinson and Michael Elavsky are touring the globe this summer. 

When Sherry is in Pennsylvania, she is working with a team around Gamification ideas - incorporating games and game-like elements into courses to create activities that are interesting and have elements like risks, rewards, achievements, and competition. 

Michael's interest area is in "global communication pedagogy".  He is going to be setting up a course experience that will be shared between Penn State students and students in the Czech Republic.  They will be using a combination of technologies and digital storytelling techniques to examine stories in the media and their cultural understandings of the world.

Finally, Jim Janzen will be working with us for over a year instead of just the summer.  His interest is in the development of mobile learning applications that can be used as a kind of just-in-time teaching assistant for students in his courses.  These would be along the lines of the Wolfram Alpha Course Assistants.

The teams are already meeting, planning, brainstorming, and breaking things.  It should be a very interesting summer (and beyond). 

We are creating a game format in which students will post current events to share with other students. Readers will "like" postings, and the one with the most "likes" will be chosen as the current event for everyone to comment on the following week. Those comments will also be up for "liking."

Posting a current event (or two) will earn a badge. Responding to the article chosen for the following week will earn a different badge. A complete set of four badges can be traded for a token.

One random current event and one random response posting will win a token.

What's a token? A magical device that can be used to extend a due date by 24 hours during the course. Unused tokens can be converted to points on a one-to-one basis at the end of the semester.

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the potential impact of games on learning.  One difficulty for this work is in finding the appropriate games to support relevant learning objectives, or if one can't be found, the time and expense of building games from scratch.  But what if one could take the elements of a game that make it fun and engaging, and integrate those into the classroom in a way that makes that class as engaging as a game (just without the actual game)?  Is it possible that the qualities of games that cause people to become engrossed for hours at a time could also cause students to become engrossed in learning?  This idea, often referred to as "gamification", is the focus of Sherry Robinson's faculty fellowship.

Our primary questions are:

1. How can game-like elements improve student engagement and motivation in two Business courses: MGMT301: Basic Management Concepts, and BA321: Contemporary Skills for Business Professionals?
2. How can we design these game-like elements so they are instructionally effective as well as easy to use by both faculty and students?

Our goals for this Summer and Fall are to:

1. Design and implement a game-like system that encourages students to write high-quality blog reflections about current events.
2. Assess the impact of that system on student attitudes about learning.
3. Develop resources for other faculty who wish to gamify their courses.

On a technical note, the systems we are currently looking at are WordPress and CubePoints.