The fourth-year Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) course, AP/HUMA 4141, taught by Steve Gennaro, is a gamified course that explores the lives of young people and their culture in and across digital spaces by offering students a cutting-edge opportunity to understand digital life themselves and to tailor the course material to their interests and the class schedule to their needs.
Gennaro is a lecturer and course director in Communications and in Children, Childhood & Youth in LA&PS, and the instructional designer for the Faculty’s Office of the Dean. He was an early adopter of online learning in the post-secondary context and has been designing and delivering courses in blended, fully online, experiential and gamified formats since as far back as 2005. This fully gamified course is a new addition to his portfolio, brought to fruition by the necessity for increasing student engagement in remote course delivery during the pandemic.
“As a learning designer, I’ve found a lot of interest from faculty in gamification,” Gennaro said. “We know that it creates incredibly strong engagement.”
Gennaro can point to AP/HUMA 4141 as an example. He has designed the course in a non-linear, self-directed game style. When students log in, they find a map that offers them various sites to visit. During the full-year course, students can choose the order and timing of those visits. At each site, they find a series of tasks to do. They can review the tasks, decide which they choose to undertake and when to submit completed work and, finally, they can assign a points value to each task – the percentage of their task grade that each chosen task will represent. Tasks include everything from reflecting on selected readings to creating blogs, photo essays, videos, magazines, board games or podcasts.
“The course is student-driven and co-constructed,” Gennaro said. “This course lets the student choose their own adventure – and this is pushing how we conceptualize the student experience in higher education.”
Originally posted in Yfile.