eLearning Roadtrip

When Learning Analytics Meet Gamification

Great minds are already at work on a very big idea: What if we morph the emerging fascination with massive N predictive learning analytics with a mechanism for collecting massive transactional behavioral data where millions and millions of subjects already willingly volunteer their input?

Learning Analytics, meet Gamification.

I don't like the term gamificiation, either. But I'm not talking about the introduction of check-ins and badges to everything. THAT is something I would much prefer to call ... playing with games. Rather, I am talking about the benefits of considering the rich massive N data source for tracking the behavioral transactions of game play. And being able to subject that big pool of data to a battery of descriptive, inferential and predictive statistical methods to identify points of loss and momentum. 

Anne Derryberry, a 2010-2011 Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri School of Journalism, has been applying what she calls purpose-driven game design to journalism and journalism education. She has focused on games as an emerging medium and distribution channel for news-telling, particularly as a means to induce community engagement and civic participation.

Her research is also indicating ways to track and analyze behavioral transactions and player interactions of an online game to enable new ways to understand points of loss and momentum in communications- related endeavors. She's coined the term "journalytics" to describe how analytics and purpose-driven game design mesh to give journalism and news outlets the metrics they need to focus and adjust their interaction strategies.

Relevant for journalism. AND education. IMHO. Early and preliminary results. But still. We in the learning world can benefit from some of these ideas.

Anne will be quick to point out that America's Army and other MMOGs have been using game play for recruitment, community building and even into predictive performance advising and professional development guidance for a while now. She has been tracking serious games for learning, training and performance support for the past few years at her blog, I'm Serious.net. But she was fascinated at seeing if the things she saw in these game-based learning designs could be relevant in other disciplines. This past year she developed noozYou as a vehicle for testing some of her hypotheses about purpose-driven game design in journalism with Mizzou journalism students. 

She can tell you about this far, far better than I can. So I am going to suggest that you follow her on Twitter at @aderryberry and @noozYou. It's been fascinating stuff.

I WILL tell you she's been advising the Sage Road crew as we've been pushing our own predictive analytics horizons. We think this approach holds great promise and has immediate, direct positive implications for the new kinds of data collection opportunities.

I continue to believe the most immediate opportunity for demonstrating the value of learning analytics in institutions and enterprises is to mine existing pools of data in creative and thoughtful ways. But Stephen Downes was absolutely right in his April 24th critique of my post Data Change Everything. He said that some of the emerging learning analytics paradigms will benefit not from mining old data new ways, but in looking for better ways to collect new information. Here is one very exciting new possibility for doing just exactly that.

 

Seven Steps for Using More Rich Media in Learning

Many of the best tips for creating rich, engaging digital assets for learning come from sources that are probably not first-of-mind for most learning designers or IDs, much less trainers, professors, or instructors.

Case in point: My so-called seven steps for ramping up the engagement level in digital learning assets, below, are a thinly disguised version of a comparable list that appeared in today's eMarketer FYI newsletter. In an ad for Adobe's Scene7 platform, no less. Do you even know about Adobe Scene7? You probably do if you are a sales and marketing professional, but I would be surprised if many elearning or education professionals did.

In any event, by changing the word "customer" to "learner", and making a few other obvious modifications, these tips for making commercial online sales sites more engaging for customers this holiday season seemed particularly relevant for those of us looking for ways to engage our stakeholders in more compelling ways:

1. Mobilize your website. When it comes to the small screen, think big. Engage with full-screen video and interactive zoom. Remember how you like to use your mobile devices. There will be many devices with different operating systems, so be sure to choose an approach that makes sense for you and your learners.

2. Socialize your rich media. Blogs and Facebook are perfect homes for rich media. Post your online “catalog” of courses, assets, links and resources  in Facebook and go after word of mouth promotion of your resources by making your multimedia viewers embeddable by bloggers.

3. Cover your rich media bases. Learners are hungry for visual information. Cover all the bases, from visual search to to pan and zoom on all images and angles. Put up online examples, games and apps. (Chatroulette, anyone?)

4. Enrich your online image. Don't be static this term. Engage learner with rich-media activities and messages. Give your learners reasons to keep checking back to see what ELSE is new.

5. Persuade, delight & inform with videos. Speak to your learners with moving images; lectures, demos, interviews, field trips. Self-produced or links from YouTube.    

6. Invite user-generated content. Ask your learners to share their product experiences with photos and videos. Getting members of your learning community to contribute content makes the experience more authentic.

7. Let learners have fun designing one-of-a-kind assets and apps. Give learners the tools to personalize or design an online experience of their own. Use configurators to keep assembly simple and to help deliver a great online experience regardless of their technical abilities.

Perhaps those of us who design and produce intentionally targeted communications that are intended to bring about a call to action, a change in memory, performance or emotion have more in common than we might realize.

What I'm Working On This Weekend

New Rules for Engagement

While at the Virtual School Society's LearnNowBC conference in Vancouver, British Columbia last week, I had the opportunity to speak to conference attendees during Thursday morning's general session. I shared my "New Rules for Engagement" - things to consider when thinking of ways to make learning experiences more engaging for learners of all ages. It's been a topic of interest for me for several years now.  I've included a link to a 300-word summary on the subject here  Download Top 10.Campus Computing 2007.  I understand that the LearnNowBC conference organizers are going to make my slides available to conference attendees; if you want the full presentation deck you should check their website. I will be posting an abbreviated version of the preso here on the blog in the next few days. If you are feeling brave, you can sign up for a free LearnNowBC account to watch a webcast of my presentation here.

What I didn't talk about in the presentation was some of the technical background for my interest - the fact that web designers and developers are coming up with remarkable ways to engage consumers with content, services and experiences. Web applications have come a long way from the first hard-coded unchanging Web pages and CGI Web server scripts. We've all come to understand that experience (alternatively UX, for user experience) is a hugely important variable used with Web 2.0 schemes and beyond. In some cases experience refers to some fairly explicit things that RIA (Rich Internet Applications) developers need to think about, including a view of what it takes to enable a high-quality, interactive online experience:

• It must use a ubiquitous client to maximize the audience reach.
• It must run unchanged across the Internet on multiple platforms.
• It must execute well across low- or high-bandwidth connections.
• It needs to restore processing power (not just rendering capabilities) to the client.
• It must deliver engaging user interfaces with high degrees of interactivity.
• It needs to represent processes, data configuration, sale, and feedback complexity.
• It must use audio, video images, and text in a seamless manner.
• It must support the mobile work flow by allowing users to work on and offline.
• It must allow the client to determine for itself what content or data to access and when.
• It must access multiple middle-tier services (both .NET or Java) and back-end data stores.
• It must provide a dynamic and powerful front end for the evolving Web services–based network using emerging standards such as XML, Ajax.
• It must integrate with legacy applications and systems.
• It must allow the incremental addition of new functions to existing Web applications and environments to get the most out of existing Web application investments.

(NOTE: I learned all this stuff when I was at Macromedia during the early 2000s -when Macromedia was working on what Beth Davis, Tom Hale and others had started calling "Rich Internet Applications". Whoda thunk they were going to end up naming a new category of web applications. Way to go you guys.)

But experience is also a subjective construct. And I did talk about this part in the session last week. I suggested that educators could learn some important lessons from the "experience economy", and pointed to some very specific and well know examples of experience extending the value of a brand. Specifically:

• Starbucks is more than a cup of coffee (e.g., expectation of a place to hang out; WiFi; consistent expectations for coffee, snacks, all over the world)
• iTunes is more than music (micro-economic exchange model for content authors, demonstrated with iTunes, iTunesU, and now with the App Center)
• Amazon is more than books (gift recommendations; purchase recommendations)
• Why shouldn't learning be more than good pedagogy and effective instructional design? 

In the new eLearning, engagement and experience really do matter.

I also suggested that that we needed to look to other disciplines to see how they are dealing with life in the "Age of Engage". I offered some examples specifically from advertising, and summarized empirical evidence describing what it takes to bring about a sustained change perception, opinion, affect and ability.

So, from all that, I boiled my research and readings, stories and experiences on this topic down into eight heuristics, New Rules for Engagement for teaching and learning stakeholders to consider every time they think about what it takes to enable learning experiences that engage and inspire.

Here are my 8 Simple Rules for Engaging Learners:

• Capture your learners' attention - With everything going on out there, you need them to focus.
• Convince them to care - What difference will this new information make? Don't keep it a secret.
• Motivate them to change - Can you articulate the WIIFM ("What's in it for ME?") for stakeholders?
• Give them choices - Engagement comes from finding ones own way, with guidance to make it happen.
• Connect them with community - everyone likes reinforcement from others who think the same way.
• Induce them to participate - Make it seem like it's THEIR idea.
• Enable opportunities to contribute - See Point 4, above.
• Make it an experience to remember.

Enough said.