Game Over

My experience playing a game to complete a graduate course was a very interesting one, to say the least. It quickly became apparent that what I would leave the class with would be directly proportional to how I engaged with the curriculum through various learning quests and Second Life meetings. In addition to the subject matter content that I learned throughout the course of this class, I found the design principles of the course to be quite valuable in helping me to continually evolve my paradigm of classroom and online learning.

I greatly appreciated the self-paced nature of the curriculum. Crafting my own learning narrative through participating in self-selected quests was a very rewarding aspect of my learning experience. It not only added value to the course, it also allowed me to personalize my learning. This open style of quest completion also caused me to question the timelines that we set with our curricular calendars for students. I completed the majority of my quests and earned most of my XP within the first month of the course and had infrequent engagement with course materials afterwards as a result. Though this asymmetrical relationship with course content may seem problematic to some, I found that it allowed me to build the background content knowledge early that I was able to use as a frame of reference for our continued discussions throughout the rest of the class.

Another concept that I was forced to wrestle with is personalization vs standardization of learning. While I enjoyed my experience in this course, as a result of its design, there is no way for the instructor to compare my learning to my classmates'. Though this sounds idyllic, would a similar quest-based system approach with core content areas be as meaningful and valuable in our Common Core era? In this type of system, how is the teacher's effectiveness measured? How is the efficacy of the instructional design determined as well?

This class, as well as its quest-based approach, is built on a different foundation than traditional classrooms and learning experiences are. There is not only a shift in power and control over learning. There is also a shift in trust, responsibility, and accountability. I see this as a very positive opportunity for learning to start meaning something again. However, I also see giant obstacles standing in the way of such a theoretically desirable system of teaching and learning and how our classrooms currently operate.

Is one qualitatively better than the other? Is there a one-size-fits-all approach for engaging students with content through teaching and learning? Do elements of good game design influence good teaching or is it the other way around? Perhaps the most valuable idea that I gained in this class is the opportunity to experience flux in my philosophy of education. As opposed to a sit-and-get class, this one has left me with questions to ponder and practices to experiment with that transcend the timeframe of this semester. To use gamer jargon, there is a lot of XP that I still have left to earn.