 Thanks, Michael. G'day, Moodlers. Thanks for swinging by. Going to share with you a few ideas, as Michael said, about helping to improve learner engagement and motivation in your online courses. Don't panic. We're not going to turn your Moodle course into a game. It's nothing that sinister. But rather, we're going to borrow some principles from gaming and perhaps see what the end result might bring us. So, research group Gartner predicted that by 2015, around 50% of organizations that manage innovative processes will gamify those processes. Okay, so that time has come and gone and their predictions, in fact, did come to a reality. Gaming is very much ubiquitous these days. It's everywhere. It permeates not only life and business, but it's finding its way into education as well. It's influencing human behaviour. So, I guess to illustrate that, perhaps a quick show of hands. Think, perhaps, if you're a member of a loyalty rewards program, stick your hand up so that could be you know, a virgin velocity, let's say, it could be Qantas frequent flyer, fly buys. If you own a credit card or a department store card, and you know, you rack up points and then you can trade those in. It looked as though I'd say three quarters of hands went up. Thank you. So, you know, I guess that in itself would say that we've been gamified. By business it's not a bad thing, but it's just a matter of fact. So, look, to illustrate that point a little further and to share with you some context I'll tell you a bit about my journey to be here at the moot. Like a lot of you, perhaps you came from interstate. I had to jump on a plane from sunny Queensland and, you know, my preferred Carries Virgin. I'm a member, proud member of their velocity rewards program. So, the game is very simple. You know, you fly with them, you earn points every time you fly, achieve a higher status, earn benefits, things like free lounge access, priority baggage, check in, even seating at the front of the plane. So, that's the name of their game. Current status. I'm a gold member. I've sort of been elevated from silver, so I was quite chuffed with that when I sort of got the email notification. Now, I'm aiming for higher things. You know, I sort of want to try and get to platinum. Apparently, the benefits are better still. So, I'm motivated and rewarded and I guess velocity and virgin have sort of tapped into that idea of influencing consumer and human behaviour. Okay. You may or may not be able to see my points balances around about half a half a million points. Richard Branson assures me that will earn me a return trip to the moon. So, we'll see how we go. I think it's time for me to cash in some of these points. So, you get your plane ticket. Optionally, you could hire a car if need be. So, you can even earn more points. Alternatively, you could redeem points that you've amassed already and instead of spending money, use your points to hire that car. You may have noticed billboards on the motorways and around town, much the same thing again. You don't have to spend money if you're playing their game. You know, you can fill up your hire car or your vehicle and earn points. And down the track those points can be redeemed for prizes and things. So, picture this. I've checked in at the airport, straight through the security gates on the way to the lounge as you do when you're a proud Gold member. And just out of the corner, I noticed McDonald's is running a promotion. I saw them in the food court there and I've got no interest in hamburgers. But they're ad-court my eye. You know, they're playing this monopoly game. So, you can win instantly. You download the app and the odds are pretty good at winning one in five. You could find out more. I'm not quite sure with the slogan, the eat, learn and play, but what's the connection between eating and playing and learning? But perhaps McDonald's is onto something. Gamification and action. Another quick show of hands. This has changed your gears now. We'll get to Moodle very soon. Who's used or who's played Pokemon Go? Okay, it's around about 50% of us. Look for the uninitiated. It's a global phenomenon where it has been. Around about three-quarters of a billion downloads in the past 12 months or so. Apple says it was its most downloaded app for 2016. Generating for the makers of the app in the vicinity of $1.2 billion. So, it's a pretty big deal. When it was released, the app was released initially. It crashed servers and very much brought the internet to its knees. Again, what is it if you haven't used it? And we've sort of got three screen or mobile screenshots side by side there. It's not a single capture. It's a mobile app. It uses what's known as augmented reality. And the aim of the game is very simple. You catch all the creatures. It's location-based. Meaning, well, specific creatures are situated in specific locations and if you want to be good at the game, it pays to move around. In the Netherlands authorities at The Hague they took the game developers, Niantic, to court to ban these small virtual creatures. Gamers have been frequenting this poker stop. It's pretty much a landmark that's mapped by the game and the gamers were congregating this small coastal town in the Netherlands. Locals were complaining that the gamers were damaging these protected sand dunes. So, it found its way, I guess, into the courts. In Tanzania, I was there very recently. Well, I spotted a bunch of creatures as well in the wild. These weren't the virtual type. They were real ones. And as you do, when you're traveling to a place like Tanzania, you make the mandatory visit to a Masai village. They're the best known of about 100 indigenous tribes in the area. And I didn't know that. I thought they were one of a kind. So, I'd say kudos to their marketing department. So, it was hot. It was dry. It was dusty. Imagine this. We're in the middle of nowhere. I pull out my mobile phone. I'm speaking to this chap and we start playing Pokemon Go. So, he was engaged. He was engrossed. He was in the moment. We're having a hell of a time. He got distracted when my wife came to. He actually offered to trade me his 100 cows from a beautiful wife. Well, he said, actually, the going rate was 10 goats. So, he was being overly generous. And as you could imagine, I politely declined. I said, no deal. But it did get me thinking. I thought, well, had I been gamified by the head of sales? Okay. So, what are your thoughts? What you see now with the app if you're uninitiated? And for those, perhaps half of us who have used it, what makes an app like this a game so successful? Any thoughts? You can shout them out. Remind us notifications. Yes? It's addictive. Okay. That's a very good point. Everybody else is doing it. So, it's sort of, it's in vogue. It's trendy. It plays on nostalgia. Good one. Any others? Reputation. And it's competitive. Absolutely. Gratification. Thank you very much. So, a lot of people think the answers to life and happiness is in that handheld distraction device. It's quite curious. And that's it. I agree completely with everything you said there. A few other thoughts that come to mind. Why is it so successful? It's engaging. It's fun. It's motivating its users. And it rewards them. Even if in a tokenistic virtual digital sense. Say it again. It's as easy to use. It's intuitive. Yeah, this is true. You download the app. It's on your phone. You launch it. And away you go. And you take it with you. So, that notion of mobility. Okay. Let's change it up now. We're getting to Moodle very soon, I promise. What if our students felt the same way about their learning? What about apps such as Pokemon Go? How might that impact education? Well, there's a problem. We know ideally that training shouldn't gaze the learner. But the reality is oftentimes different. Learning experiences may be mandatory. Too easy or too difficult. Boring. Unrewarding. Or irrelevant to the learner at that point in time. So, in fact, there may be a disconnect between the ideals of online education and the actual learner experience. So, is there a way in which we can make learning fun, rewarding, motivating, and all those things that we mentioned there just before? Perhaps a solution lies in gamification. So, just quickly by definition, it's the act of the or gamification is the act of the art of applying game-based principles to improve non-game things. So, that it could include, as we illustrated before, business life and so too education. Here's a quick rundown. And again, it's by no means an exhaustive list of game or gaming principles. But, you know, if you did a quick scan of the relevant literature, there are some common, you know, some common tenets that do come up. And perhaps we can borrow some of these principles to enhance learning as online educators. So, I'll run through a couple of them very quickly and we'll see them then in the context of Moodle and how that relates to you. So, the notion of flow in a game, if you've ever played a game, you know, it's that notion of being not too bored, not too challenged, you're kind of in that Goldilocks zone or that sweet spot where you're really focused on the task at hand. So, we've got to really get our educators in that sweet spot as well. The idea of resilience is being able to build a positive or a balance of positive and negative emotions just in gamers but in our learners. So, they can't always be winners. They need to sometimes bounce back from a loss. With respect to progression, it's all about, you know, this idea of a continual sense of progression. Games are very good at it where you level up, you know, you acquire a skill or you achieve something, you reward it and then you go to the next level or the bonus round. So, we ought to do that in our online education as well. Oftentimes, we as educators are good motivators. Can we use extrinsic or external motivation to build intrinsic or internal motivation within our learners? I'll leave the last two. You can see those and hopefully they are fairly self-explanatory. We'll see them in action in a minute. We've been moody. So, perhaps here's a formula. Three steps. We've just identified some potential gaming principles that we could borrow from. Let's supply them to learning design within our Moodle courses and then we as the educators, we can facilitate the learning experience. Okay. The good news is this, and I'll give this as the seven, I guess, easy ways or tips or ideas to consider. With Moodle, there's a bunch of inbuilt features there at your disposal that support or promote or foster gamification. And you may in fact be using them already. So, some of what I'll share with you here could be just reaffirmation that you're having a go, you're trying to engage and motivate your learners and that's excellent. So, avatars is a big thing. It's your persona, it's your online identity. In many games, it's the first thing you need to consider. You choose your character and perhaps an outfit, a hairdo, a weapon of choice, those kind of things. So, it's how the gamer or in our context, it's how the learner relates to their experience in an online environment. You can see here, you could go to your profile page within Moodle, upload a picture of yourself via your user profile. You know, it could be a selfie, perhaps some people are more comfortable uploading a picture of their pet or their favourite sporting team, whatever is appropriate. Not just for us, I think it's also important that our students or our users, our learners are doing this. The idea is that we'll help personalise the learning and promote a sense of ownership in that experience. And let's face it, you know, we're starting to blend our learning. We're not all 100% traditional face-to-face educators anymore. There could be an online component. So, that's where the avatar comes into its own. Groups, groups promote this sense of belonging, belonging to a team and oftentimes that motivates our learners. You can see a group is a course centric concept. You can go in, if you've got a bunch of students, you can manually add them to respective groups. They can be randomly allocated. You could apply, I guess, clusters of groups or groupings and then outside a course in a category or a site-wide context as things you may be familiar with such as cohorts. The same applies. You can put people into teams in different contexts within your Moodle and also apply an avatar or an image to that group or grouping or cohort. And, you know, wherever those learners go across the system, wherever they contribute learning artefacts, that image will be there, you know, like the brand or the badge for that particular team. Activity tracking, that reinforces the notion of or the gaming principle of progression and I reckon flow as well. The whole idea of you complete an activity according to a criteria or a set of conditions, you earn a tick, you move forward onto the next. So games are very good at promoting that sense of flow and progression and we can do much the same in our Moodle courses. Conditional access. So it's all about rules and access. So the learner must follow the defined rules, the rules that we define as educators and they gain access or they unlock new learning material in the course. So in this example here, you know, it's a case of the learner first needing to read perhaps a web page resource and having done that, it will unlock the discussion forum where they can introduce themselves. We'll be familiar with quizzes. There's also a quiz results block. It's not there typically by default but you can add that. It's very trivial. That will give you, as you see there, a leaderboard sort of situation in your course and it does introduce a competitive element and the idea there I guess the gaming principle that would tap into is resilience. Again, we can't all be winners. Sometimes we've got to accept that we're losers. I guess if you were Brenda in this situation on that particular leaderboard, you know, you'd be feeling pretty good about yourself. Gary by comparison, he may be feeling that he's got to lift his game. Course completion status. This ties in very nicely with activity tracking and that sense of progression and flow and goal setting. So once we've enabled activity tracking and we've got a learning sequence, you would add the course completion status block and configure that. That's quite a quick and easy thing to do. So the idea there would be that it has a clear indication of where they are in a course and what they need to do to complete the course. So they're no longer in learning limbo, I would call it before activity tracking and course completion tracking came along. That was often times the case in Moodle. Teachers and learners really didn't know who was where and where the finish line was at. And lastly badges. So for the uninitiated a badge is like a digital reward. In this case the little avatar you can see there. So you can earn badges for completing things like activities in a course or completing a course or even simple things like updating your user profile. So administrators, teachers can enable and configure these things. It's all about, I guess badges is about status, power and rewards and again these things are very motivating to learners often times. So the idea here being we can or the learners retain the badges and they can display them in various places. So the user profiles typically in this case they can display them on what's known as the Mozilla backpack. They're our friends that brought us the Firefox browser. Not much involved to configure your Moodle site if you're an administrator and have it connect and push badges to the backpack. And then from there users can show off their badges on third party sites and services like Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere. Naturally it's what's the big deal with a badge? Well it's all about showing evidence that you've acquired skills and knowledge in a digital sense potentially. It could help the learners land a job, earn a promotion and of course show off to their peers. Just quickly then, so that was all sort of I guess the core and built features within Moodle and some of them just really the tip of the iceberg. A couple things in about Mozilla that might be of interest to you. A few plugins so these are third party. They're not maintained or managed by HQ and I suppose the caveat would be use them at your peril and they're not necessarily compatible with your version of Moodle. So give it due diligence. Progress Bar is much loved it's a block there, it hooks in very nicely with activity tracking. It's perhaps more visual than what you would see otherwise. So you know you've got the colour coding there indicating what has or hasn't been completed and the status for the end user. So now that promotes this notion of progression and flow. Leveling up. So very simply we gain experience points and we level up within a course. So you know we attach these points to activities. So you know you complete the activity and you earn points. So that should be motivating. It's all about power, access and rewarding our learners. So that's kind of what a typical configuration page would look like for power up. You can see there you know you earn 15 experience points when a condition or conditions are true. So introduce yourself in a discussion forum and you know you post. And then for you know not just the teacher but the learner potentially. Again another ladder or leaderboard. So again it's this idea of status and resilience. Okay stash. Now if you've been on Adrian's presentation here yesterday it was a goodie. This is all about completing the activity and earning digital or virtual objects. So they could be whatever you want. I mean examples typically things like coins, crowns, swords. If you've got a more adult audience you might have to use your creativity a bit more. But the aim of the game is you accumulate or stash a fine number of objects and that unlocks access to future learning in the course. Okay that's the short of the long. Again it's all about access, power and reward for the learners. Key gaming principles. So this is kind of the configuration page for the educator. So the user requires a defined object in their stash or objects and then that unlocks or gives them access to a given activity. Okay. And then a report might look something like this. Is anyone here using stash? Of course you are. And I've got your email as well so we can talk later. Thank you. Okay this is an oldie but a goodie. I see badge is the 21st century equivalent of this certificate but this is quite okay as well. It's all about power and status and rewarding our learners when they achieve a desired outcome from our training and from their learning. Okay so this is quite a tidy plugin. Okay wrapping things up. I think it's important we swim between the flags. There's at least a few red flags I came across so I sort of did a little bit of a meta analysis of some gamification studies. It's a real buzz phrase in the education space we know at the minute. And look from what I understand context of education some of the research indicates that gamification is a good thing and it may improve engagement and motivation engagement and motivation. Let me say that again. However there's no clear evidence and no clear link that this results to better learning outcomes so I hate to disappoint you but that's what I saw in the meta analysis. So my thought would be this if your online learners aren't fully engaged in the learning experience at the very least gamification may be worth a go. So simple formula as we said before apply the gaming principles facilitate the learning and perhaps observe the outcomes and importantly report back to the Moodle community because we'd be all really interested to see how it gets along. So a quick bit of food for thought. Confucius he was a great Chinese thinker social philosopher back in about 500 BC he said tell me and I forget show me and I remember let me do and I understand and I reckon he was on the right track. This whole idea that engagement is king or queen and what he was saying I thought learners need to be active not passive participants in their education. So to that end what Confucius was saying is a pretty good fit for the idea of gamification. That is about it. I'm mindful of time and interesting stuff. Thank you Chad.