 Good morning. I'm Stephen Bader. I work for NC State University as a Moodle developer. I've been working for NC State for over three years now, all of which has been with Moodle. One of my first projects was created an automated course copier to go between our instances. I got to work with Greg Kraus with the accessibility patches, but recently I've been working on a gamification module, which I'm going to share the experience with you and kind of the process that we work through. I'm going to try to deliver this with my instructional designer hat that I don't own. So remember I'm a developer and by default that means I'm an introvert, and this right here is absolutely terrifying. So just to go through an outline, I'm going to cover you know why we chose to gamify a course, the crazy notion that that was, how we define gamification because it's kind of a nebulous right now. It's the Wild West. How we evaluated Moodle's current ability to gamify a course and how and what we felt we needed to develop so that we could properly gamify a course. And then I'm going to share some of our first case studies you can call on. So somewhere at the beginning of 2014, I was approached by one of our course designers and she had an instructor that had a wild hair. He wanted to create a game that would help students explore career opportunities in the sports sector. And having just went through the develop of a mobile game for a course of previous year, I was in full denial. We learned a lot developing that mobile game. Most importantly, we learned that it absorbs a lot of time and that it's very little of it is reusable for future projects. So after some back and forth, the notion of gamification got dropped and we decided to go ahead and vet it. So I went looking. The most common definition for gamification is the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game context, which is a misconception with anybody that you say is, you know, I'm gamifying a course. All they hear is, oh, you're making a game. It's like, no, there's there's no game. We're taking the context of the course. We're using, we might want to plug in this laptop. I have 7%. We'll try to fly through this. Yeah, so you're trying to use the context and use some of the game mechanics around them to walk people through the context. And you work with their natural desire for competition, achievement, status. That did it. Thank you. Okay, so we identified three major components of gamification. The first one is objectives. The behavioral mechanic that the user is responsible for. It's, it could be a known mechanic or it could be something that's underlying. You know, we're waiting that we're waiting for them to walk across this tripwire. The progression, it's a mechanism or strategy that directs your users actions. So, you know, walk them through the course, walk them through the context, help hold their hand. And this, this could be subtle or or button or blatant. You can, you know, go read this. And then feedback, the results and rewards given to that user, things that they're trying to achieve. We discovered that we're all not created equal, which is not a shocker. According to Richard Bartle, we can break gamers up on a basic level and into four types. And you can apply to more than one type. But you've got the killers who just want to compete with others. You've got explorers who want to just see everything there is and make sure they haven't missed anything. You've got the achievers to make sure that they've collected all or conquered everything. And then you've got the socializers who are there because other people are there and they want to either co-op a little bit or, you know, have fun with friends. But if your friend wasn't there, they probably wouldn't be there either. So to effectively gamify a course, we had to find a way to, you know, appease everybody, all the different types of players. If you go online, you can search for Bartle test. And there's a couple of tests out there that will, you know, kind of identify what kind of gamer you are. I'm not saying I'm a killer. So we turn to Moodle to see what there was in the way of gamification. And I like going to some of the other gamification talks because everybody's got this really unique way of taking the grade book and making a point system or different pieces of Moodle and turning in that way. But I really didn't want to, I didn't want it to be gimmicky. So I wanted to make sure, you know, what I found we could really use on a good level. So we revisited things that you're aware of, restrict access, which allows us to do a little bit of water falling, some leveling or staging, activity completion, which helps, you know, we could provide a checklist or some type of indication of progression. And of course, badges, but we found at least at the time, we didn't want it to be a site-wide thing. We wanted course level achievements, things that were inside our scope. So we started to outline what we thought we needed to do gamification right. We needed more definable objects, since that was one of the major components that we said was built around gamification. We needed points and leaderboards to help with our feedback component and our killer gamers. We needed some eye candy or visual progress to help with the progression component and, you know, unique ways with our explorer players. And we needed course level achievements for our collectors to go after. And that's where we were going to start. So I'm going to try not to get devy and talk about the gamification module. It consists of a system Arc type module, which just means it's a module inside a Moodle, but it works behind the scenes. We built a block where the management of the gamification components takes place. You can create multiple point sets. You can configure leaderboards. You can divide objectives and rewards, which is kind of the meat of it. And I'll touch on this in a second. You can create course level achievements to be used as a reward. And then you can display those achievements to the students inside that same block. We also created a restrict access condition, meaning we can release topics and activities based on the completion of an objective. And finally, we created a filter to be used as a reward. And I'll have to go into more of that in a minute. So like I said, objectives and rewards, everything to do with the gamification gamification module boils down to objectives and rewards. I allowed the creation objectives to be based on activity completion, which we can define in Moodle using the module settings. I use Moodle events, the new API that I was really tickled about. I create observers to listen for just a short list of events that can be defined in an objective. Achieving a point's goal is if a student gains so many points and one of the point sets is an objective, and completing a native objective, which means I've completed several defined objectives. After you create your objective, you can attach rewards to it. So when the student meets it, it assigns the rewards to that student. It can be a course level achievement to be shown in the block. It can be a file because the block has a backpack. We've toured you with the idea of having scavenger hunts or clues, but we're tiptoeing on game and not gamification in that aspect. So we haven't gotten a point to use it. A point's reward to a specific point set, which happens a lot, and the filter reward. So real quickly, we're going to take a closer look at one of the objectives. One of my favorites is the Moodle event. You can see that clearly. Yeah. So here we've selected that we're going to create an objective. It's going to be a Moodle event. The event's going to be a viewed chapter, which we refer to as pages. But in Moodle, they're called chapters in our book. And we've selected the specific page that they've got to read that will trigger this objective, say that this objective has been complete. So when a student views that page, they'll receive the reward. You may also notice for Moodle events, the objectives can be repeatable. So it's good for form posts or reading the book several times. Looking closer at the filter reward that I promised, the filter reward will allow us to reward new content to add or replace content for a token. And I don't want to make that confusing, but you place a token inside an HTML block, a topic, any word that your whizzy wig, it's going to get filtered. And what will happen is if the student hasn't received any of the filter rewards, the token goes away. But if they have, then they'll receive the content for that reward. And the example I have here is we have a background image that was in one of our topic blocks. And as the student went through the course and did one of the optional activities, they got, you know, the greenhouse. And we just add another image and with CSS, we dropped it over top of each other. So it's a layered image. It was just visual eye candy that was rewarding and caused people to go and do the optional activities. I've got a couple screen shots to show it in action. This is the student view of a plant identification course. The course had 10 topics related to different plants. Each topic had three required activities, course activities, and about seven optional activities, all of which generated gardener points. And for the leaderboard that you can see on the right, those are fake names, and then achievements that are also on the right there, based on the activities. This is the other course I was talking about. It's mainly just a filter reward. As activities are completed, your home state gains more and more landscape pieces. And like I said, it's just eye candy, but we got some really positive reviews on it. But let's talk about our original course. PRT 266, Introduction to Sport Management. The goal was to engage the students more and have them explore the career opportunities that best fit their interests. We started building the course by adding 75 optional activities that rewarded job skill points themed around that activity. Not all the activities were revealed at once, and most had to be unlocked by completing prior activities or being to a specific point in your career. So it wasn't just a flood of activities. Then we created 139 job opportunities, mainly assignment or quiz modules that resembled resume or interviews. The jobs varied in levels and revealed themselves based on required job skills, which the students could see. And they knew that I have to do a few more activities to get a better job. The activities were based on course objectives that the instructor wanted them to explore. So only a few of those jobs were released at a time, and based on the skills, they only saw a few jobs as they worked through their career or the pathing of that course. So at most, they probably saw 10 to 15 jobs. So it's not like all 139 were there. I should mention that the career exploration portion of this course was completely optional. The course also had the usual required material. And looking back at the course, we might have went a bit overboard, but we were inspired. But it did create a very dynamic exploration of sports careers and a unique experience for every student. Everyone had a different experience, and there were discussions based on what people were seeing and where they were getting stuck. After our first semester, we received nearly full class in participation in our optional career exploration activity. We only saw a small bump in the average grade. But the students felt the content was explained better, according to end of course valuations from the previous semester, that the instructor was more effective, and that the course was overall better. On the flip side, the instructor felt like the students were more engaged in the course, both in his face to face course and online, and that the classroom had more meaningful conversations because they were actually doing activities that were related to jobs. Our plant identification course was much more tame in scope of things. We had 14 students and they all passed. The instructor reported that there was a big increase in the optional activities. So that for each topic, we had seven of them, and if a student went down that path, they really got involved into the optional activities. This included mystery plant assignments, finding plants in nature, bringing them into class, creating a journal, and then different classroom interactions that were rewarded. And then finally, we presented the gamification module at EDUCAUSE this past February from inside a gamified Moodle course. I didn't realize how dangerous that was until I looked back at it. So as we presented, we walked the audience through topic by topic in a single topic format. Through the course, while they were engaged with the material, the light material that we had, and they received presentation points. We had 62 members in the audience, and when it was all said and done, 52 of them had participated in our activities. It was mainly due to a leader board that was on the sidebar, as we were moving through, that showed participants and how many points they had, and quickly it turned into a competition. And all of a sudden, that's what it was. One of the final questions was, I'm missing two points. They found out that they didn't click my Twitter link. After the conference, out of nowhere, 70 more people enrolled in the course. So it was word of mouth, but they went through the entire course, and I guess you could say self-learned. So in all, we counted that a success. What's next? We have a new challenge with a very difficult course. It's microbiology, immunology. It's a little disturbing content. We're going to attempt to create a study tool that builds itself as the students move through the course. So we've got some great animators at work, or graphic artists, but they're going to make these cards. And as you go through the course, you're going to earn the cards, and then it's going to be a study tool. And we hope that once they figure out the more stuff I involve myself in, the more success that I can bring to myself. So we'll see how it goes. It's still largely in development. And I'm working with the Office of Tech Transfer at NC State so that I can share this out to the community. I would love for others' input. We're still learning about gamification. We're still learning about the cool things that we can do inside of Moodle, and everything's still kind of in development altogether. And that's really it. We're working hard to not make it gimmicky. We're not trying to make games. We're just trying to drive students through the course using gamification techniques. That is all. I'll take my questions now. Thank you for your presentation here. One question I have is how much time would you say went into developing either of these courses? A lot. Especially our first one where we still have a lot of time being spent on learning and on how to develop the course. I think a lot of our success is that because we need to plan out the gamification of the course, we're actually spending a lot of time in course development. So it's like we almost gamified the creation of the course as well. The instructor worked really hard on all the courses I've been on. They put in a lot of effort and the course turned out amazing. There's great graphics. There's great content. They have to really think about activities. It's not just thrown together like sometimes you see. So a lot of time has gone into it. We have started looking at, I don't want to say templates but ways that we can start working through a process quicker. But really we're still on ground zero. And that's kind of why I want to get this out into the community and maybe get some feedback and not feel like I'm still on a little island trying to figure it out. Foot surgery in April. What kind of relationship do you have between the activities that are gamification activities and the grading in the course? Because it sounds like you've got essentially optional or alternative assignments. And that's something our instructors are really interested in. Right. So we've got to tiptoe a little bit, right? Because of FERPA, because of leaderboards. We don't want, I don't want to be able to look at a leaderboard and go, oh, you know, Michael's number one on the leaderboard. He must be the A student in the class. Then we're starting to, you know, get in trouble. So everything's optional. We work really hard at making the points that you receive and the things that happen, something that was extracurricular, so that it doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with grades. We have mixed it with the required material. We've given achievements with the required material. That's something only a student sees. I see my achievements not others right now. So we do blend it a little bit. Thank you.