Navi, StepUp, OpenBadges and ¿Gamification?

It was a long time ago since my last post... but is always to get back to good habits...

Yesterday there was a really nice discussion in our HCI course where we are evaluating our Open Badges approach.

In this experiment several tools take part:

• Navi: It's the dashboard to display the badges to our students. As you probably know, we are continuously iterating our prototypes and this is not an exception ;) So feedback is welcome! Btw, this app is developed by Sven Charleer who joined our team on January.
• StepUp back-end: If you have read previous posts on this blog, you know that I am working on trackers and visualizing this information in a meaningful way for students (or at least I try)
• Open Badges system: We rely on Mozilla Open Badges System to give the students the possibility to share their badges with the outside world through social networks.
• Analytics layer (sorry, it does not have any URL): The backend that contains all the rules to award the badges.
• Activity Stream of the course: Following the same concept of TinyARM that aims to increase the awareness on what others are reading, we merge the different activity streams of the course such as twitter, blogs and badges in the activity stream, offering to filter by the different actions.

What is the goal of this experiment? Are we gamifying the course?

Badges are game elements but they are representation of achievements. Some students claimed yesterday that applying gamification to master students was a bit childish... and I am aligned with this idea... there are even current research that goes against the gamification of learning because it breaks the real motivation of learning... everybody should have their own intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for learning... however how the teacher teaches the lesson is other point... if he does it dynamically, participative, collaborative or simply boring is up to him or some rules of the institution... and usually is up to the student, to attend the f2f lessons (except if they are mandatory), to be participative, etc... and learning analytics tools can be part of these decissions.

Learning analytics are other additional resource to help the students to steer their own learning process, but is up to the student to use the tools that we provide. We usually test our applications with bachelor and master students and our assumption is that they are autonomous students... they will become engineers and computer scientists soon... so our first assumption couldn't go in different direction.

So... What are badges for us?

Our assumption is that badges are a representation of achievements and a mean to reflect on what is going in the class.

If you (as a student) are not tweeting, commenting or blogging but you see that others are getting badges for it, it may trigger a question:

• why is the teacher giving badges to the students? The answer is clear, we are encouraging positive behavior.

There are some badges considered as neutral, but they are given periodically. Theoretically, they want to increase the awareness of what you or other student has done. We could use some chart instead, whereas badges represents an achievement, visualizations rely on the user the cognitive effort to drive conclusions and we try to simplify this reflection process.

If someone finds a fun element in this process, it's great! It will increase the motivation and it usually have positive effects! But... Learning is already fun by itself!

And what are we trying to figure out from our students? Do they consider them useful? As a reflection mean, as motivational elements, as positive feedback... they decide and:

WE LEARN FROM THEM