Use Active Learning or Do Not Pass Go

How to not drive yourself insane and/or see your hard work flop

I talk with a lot of faculty who are very excited by the idea of using game-based learning and I love to see that excitement. I share it, or I wouldn’t be here writing this blog, let alone have spent years trying to figure out the best ways to use GBL. Or more recently how to use technologies like virtual reality.

But as you might have figured out about me by now, I have no problem quickly getting to the meat of what might cause a plan to fail. I can’t help myself; my brain wants to know these things. And the most spectacular way your plan (to make a GBL curriculum or use VR in your courses) will fail is to try to go straight to using them while your course is still heavily didactic (lecture-based).

A monopoly chance card no one likes to see when playing the game.

The first question I ask an instructor when they want to use GBL or VR is how much lecture vs active learning is happening in the course. If the scale is tipped heavily towards lecture, I steer them down the road to making an active course before they try GBL.

There is a reason that is the first ‘kill point’ question in my choose-your-own-adventure style Should You Use VR in Your Course Decision Tree. Because if you haven’t been teaching an active course for a while and haven’t started to figure out how that works for you, your course, and your students, then you aren’t ready for GBL or VR.

Sure, you can do a complete redesign and jump into the deep end, but I find that is a rarity because it feels like a huge, scary lift without someone to guide you and provide feedback. If you have a person to work with you every step of the way, then awesome.

But most of us don’t. I know I didn’t. I have come a loooong way from that day when I was a teaching assistant hosting review Jeopardy with my discussion section and one of the tenured professors came in to tell us to keep the noise down. I have progressed. Not in noise reduction levels, per se, but in how much my instruction is infused with GBL and not just using a game for one class meeting.

How do you transition from didactic (lecture-based) to active?

I won’t lie and say it will be quick or easy. That whole journey extends beyond the scope of any one post. But I can point you toward a couple things to get you started.

Take a hard look at your course goals

Look at the verbs in your objectives. Are they action verbs? Or are they words like ‘understand’?

You can’t measure understanding and unless your objectives have action words that lead to something a student does to demonstrate mastery, you aren’t going to get anywhere with GBL.

The quality of your course objectives are directly tied to the quality of your activities and assessments because these flow out of them. You need to make sure your objectives focus on application and action as a very basic foundation before you move on to the fun parts.

I have another post on the topic of competencies and objectives I suggest you look at for more information.

Once your objectives allow for active learning, borrow liberally from people with good ideas

I am sure you have heard the joke about how much educators borrow from others. Well, we can do that because we are a group of people who also tend to like to share.

People have taken this path before and while you are unlikely to find someone with a full course for you to use (it wouldn’t have the same course goals anyway) you will find examples and ideas.

I suggest searching online for your field in combination with:

• Game-based learning

• Project-based learning

• Inquiry-based learning

These will give you a start, but pay attention to the terminology people tend to use when discussing these in relation to your field. Terminology tends to be different from one field to the next and using it will help you refine your search results.

For instance, when I was still teaching history and trying to figure out how to use GBL, I was heavily influenced by Reacting to the Past and I ended up using some of the open-source versions (you have to join to get access, but it was free the last time I checked) and eventually making some of my own.

This might feel like a lot of extra work, but it is absolutely essential you have a good foundation. I have seen many people discard GBL as ineffective without realizing that because they didn’t till the soil, there was no hope of anything good growing.

Have any examples you want to share with others? Put them in the comments.