On Gamification and Online Learning

I've been talking with a colleague recently about gamification and online courses, and I just wanted to jot down a very quick thought about this topic before it gets away from me.

More than a decade later, we continue to fumble and stumble forward in gamified learning. This is somewhat typical for any kind of adventurous educational practice, and it's largely unsurprising that to the extent gamfication has been adopted it appears to mostly be in its blandest forms. That is to say, pointsification and badgification, the forms that sit most comfortably alongside both the traditional grammar of schools and capitalism continue to be what most people associate with gamification.

As we look at online learning, especially in a post "COVID Emergency Remote Instruction" world, there are obvious reasons why these forms of gamification are unlikely to be especially helpful. This seems particularly evident to me in the context of the California Community College system I work where we're struggling with equity issues. Basically, those gamification mechanics are unlikely to effectively solve the problem of course engagement at all, and they're a terrible fit mechanically for getting students to engage in social learning.

This doesn't mean that gamification is a lost cause in equity minded online learning. It does, however, mean that we need to do the real work of UX/game designers if we want to find forms of gamification that are likely to result in the kinds of outcomes we seek. We need to design gameful (and ideally playful) mechanics into our courses that allow students to engage meaningfully with one another. I have some ideas about what some of those could be, but that I don't have the time to write that blog post today. For now, I'll just leave you with the thought that earning badges to motivate students or letting them earn points that allow them to "buy" opportunities in a course are mechanics for individual activity. They aren't social, and they don't promote either a sense of community/belonging, or a dynamic of peer-to-peer learning.