Some notes on course design and assignments

Since adopting 3dgamelab as a teaching tool, I have had the opportunity to think about assignment design. Below are some that turned out to be quite engaging for students:

Design a midterm

This was inspired from a brainstorming session about student self-assessment. Only a person who has a strong grasp about the course material can design appropriately calibrated midterm questions. Such questions have to address core concepts and do so in a way that compels the test taker to use them. So I figured, why not give the students the task of designing a few midterm questions? I instruct them to do fourish multiple choice questions and two short answer questions. The assignment works really well - not a few students design better questions than I would have, and the exercise quickly reveals which students are still struggling with the material.

Swapping papers

One of the problems of academic paper writing exercises for students is to get the needed feedback to improve. One of the problems for instructors is to get papers with relatively elementary issues, like grammar, punctuation and the like - writing issues that are really on the secondary level of schooling. At post-secondary, instructors (in my experience) would prefer to deal with the structure of the paper, or the strength of the argument and research. 

This assignment is designed to address both of the above problems. It has students switch papers with each other before handing in the draft to the instructor. They read a peer's paper and comment on it constructively - what was strong, what can be improved? For the student, it has the benefit of having them reflect on the writing process as a reader, so when they go back to their own paper they can use that perspective more effectively during editing. Also, they get some feedback from a peer who can hopefully catch the most glaring grammar issues. The instructor on average gets papers of higher quality.

Flip the classroom

First, I decided to remove the planned lecture series from the course design. Since I was using a webtool to deliver the course assignments anyway, I felt that any material that would have been presented through a traditional lecture series could just as well be done through YouTube-videos. Thus I started my channel. I upload all the lecture material there. In my experience, the material presented through the traditional 50 minute lecture can be presented through a 10-15 minute video just as well. The shorter time frame requires being more concentrated with the information and the fact that students can re-watch the video an infinite number of times effectively avoids the problem of wondering whether students will remember what you said in a lecture six weeks ago.

These videos become mini-assignments for students to watch and then I use the classroom time for exercises that compel the students to use the concepts introduced in the videos. The time saved through this method cannot be overestimated.

The role-plays

And that's where the role-plays come in. These are design to provide a simulation of the institutions and political contexts the students are studying in the readings and are inspired by edu-larps (educational live action role-playing) and Model UN. In short, this is game-based learning. Students take the roles of politicians, journalists, civil servants or clients and act within the incentive structure of the institution in question. The debriefs they have to do after each simulation shows how effective the tool is. These are some of the models designed (there is more):

Introduction to Comparative politics

• US Congress - pass a budget
• UK House of Commons - Question Period
• German Parliament - build a government coalition post-elections
• French Unitary State - build a budget in the contest between regional, departmental and municipal governments who all want state funding

Introduction to Canadian politics

• First Minister Conference - interaction between federal and provincial governments re: Senate reform
• The Newsroom - an exercise in media news triage
• An election campaign - pitch your platform and then win the televised debate. Next time I do this one, I would like to broadcast the debate live through my YouTube-channel to give the students a group of voters, too.

In my last incarnations of this, I took a cue from Sheldon's The Multiplayer Classroom, and made the role-playing continuous. That is, students took the roles that they played through the entire term, from five different "character classes", like in computer games. For Comparative Politics, these were Politician, Civil Servant, Journalist, Activist, and Academic. The idea is for each of these to have their own motivations and goals, and together, the students create a story line that probes the concepts at hand. I will be exploring this model further in the future.

Gamification and game-based learning

I mentioned in a previous post that I have had some interesting experiences with teaching methods over the last couple of years. I felt frustrations when I was using the design that is standard operating procedure for most post-secondary courses: a lecture series, possibly with discussion seminars graded based on participation and then a couple of exams and a graded paper. I did not feel that the assessment forms really were sufficient for optimizing the learnings for my students nor the model provided me with sufficient feedback to know how to facilitate their learning.

Then I discovered 3dgamelab, and everything changed. Since 2013, it is the design I use, and shown in this video

It has three main advantages, in my experience:

• formative assessment - This is different from summative assessment (i.e. a typical exam - write the exam, get a grade, move on). In formative assessment, the student will produce a learning artifact of some kind, but if it doesn't meet the requirements, I will send it back. Thus, the student learns through that feedback.
• increased student engagement through active learning - I have dispensed with the lecture series (my lectures are now available on YouTube), and use the classroom time for students to do labs or simulations, keeping them active.
• increased student agency - students can choose from a smorgasbord of assignments and complete them at a time of their choice.

The effects have been palpable, and it seems to me that the scholarship on teaching methods generally provide support for the veracity of the model. Next week, I'm presenting a paper on my experiences. Here is the abstract:

Gamification consists of the introducing game mechanics into activities to engage users with motivation beyond what is normally expected. Properties include introducing points accumulation, badges, levels, leaderboards, challenges or quests, customization, economies, avatars, and role-play. When introduced into education in the form of game-based learning, such elements can raise student motivation as well as decision-making capacity and cognitive development as students are given increased control over their learning path. In 2013, I changed my political science course design using the learning platform 3dgamelab. The experience was transformative on many levels, including learning achievements and the instructor-student relationship. This paper describes those experiences for the purpose of demonstrating the utility of game-based learning when teaching political science in higher education. It provides an overview of the literature on game-based learning in education and the significance of some integral components of a course design using 3dgamelab, including elements like active learning, the flipped classroom and formative grading. This literature provides important context for the experiences I have made transforming a lecture based course design to a game-based one. Five courses have now been delivered using this framework at the 200 and 300-level in Comparative and Canadian politics, with class sizes varying between 8 and 75 students. The paper identifies opportunities for instructors as well as potential sources of problems and how to re-think how political science education can be delivered in a more engaging way.