TEACHx 2018

While online courses continue to proliferate, instructors struggle to get their students excited about participating in discussion boards. As part of Northwestern University’s Educational Technology Teaching Fellows program in 2017, faculty member David Noffs and learning designer Jacob Guerra-Martinez collaborated on a project to determine the effectiveness of gamifying specific elements of online courses. During the first phase of their research, they documented steps to develop a model for gamifying course elements. Phase two of their work, supported by Northwestern’s Digital Learning Fellowship program, is the actual design and testing of a game element called Discussion Hero, an interactive discussion board. It was piloted in Winter 2018 in a graduate online course in the School of Professional Studies called Learning Environment Design. Discussion Hero is a gamified discussion rubric that turns discussion boards into debating boards. It encourages diverse points of view, questioning, challenging, and respectful debate. It combines the traditional awarding of points with a progress meter that allows students to visually see how they are performing on their discussion posts. This panel will feature faculty and student perspectives on this new tool and what the future holds for its adoption in other courses.