{"id":10979,"date":"2017-09-04T10:13:33","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T15:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cat.xula.edu\/food\/?p=10979"},"modified":"2017-09-04T10:13:33","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T15:13:33","slug":"gamification-in-faculty-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cat.xula.edu\/food\/gamification-in-faculty-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Gamification in Faculty Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gamification is making a boring process interesting by using fun elements from games. Educators have been using gamification even before there was an official term for it. <\/p>\n

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Gamification gets people excited like no other strategy does, probably because it holds the promise of fun and engagement, and extraordinary results. Research has shown that using gamification in education can increase learner motivation. Incentives, badges, levels, and a spot on a leaderboard are all motivators to learn. They let learners achieve in the short-term by providing visible goals.<\/p>\n

A leaderboard that measures progress can motivate learners at all levels. A leaderboard that measures skill can fail the learners who are at the bottom.<\/p>\n

Making Knowledge Public Using Educational Technology<\/a> is the theme for our 2017-18 FaCTS initiative. We decided to add gamification to our week-long FaCTS summer seminar. Unlike past FaCTS initiatives, there were a lot of assignments that had to be completed before the first day of the summer seminar. Additionally, it was important that homework assignments that were due each night of the summer seminar had to be completed to keep us on track. <\/p>\n

We setup a friendly EdTech Mage competition between the FaCTS cohort where they could earn XP for completing assignments. Our hope was that the participants would keep up with their assignments, have fun while doing so, and that the competition would give the cohort some ideas about how they might use gamification in their courses.<\/p>\n

Because the XP earned by the participants would change often, we wanted an easy way to keep up with the points and have the cohort see the leaderboard rankings. Also, we were not sure how the participants would feel about having their names on the leaderboard, so we asked participants to provide an alias to use instead. <\/p>\n

To set up our EdTech Mage leaderboard, I created a self-ranking leaderboard using a pivot table in a Google spreadsheet by following Mariana Garcia\u2019s YouTube video<\/a> instructions.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what our EdTech Mage self-ranking leaderboard looks like: <\/p>\n