Using Game Mechanics & Social Networking

Using game mechanics and social networking to motivate student contributions to a course Edward F. Gehringer Dept. of Computer Science North Carolina State University Your feedback welcome … http://tinyurl.com/expertiza

Outline The goal: Authentic assessment Virtual demo Social networking and game mechanics Reputation systems Summary 02/09/10

Authentic assessment What is it? Why is it hard? How can we facilitate it? Student-generated content Peer review 02/09/10

Student-generated content gets students working together to improve others’ learning experiences, helps them learn, by performing tasks that are similar to real-world responsibilities, gives them experience in writing their ideas up for an audience of their peers, allows each cohort to “stand on the shoulders” of students in earlier classes. 02/09/10

“Virtual” demo Creating an assignment Selecting a topic Reviewing Feedback from author to reviewer Teammate review 02/09/10

Setting up a wiki assignment 02/09/10 02/09/10

Let’s create some teams … 02/09/10 02/09/10

Here’s how we import it 02/09/10

Now there are five teams … 02/09/10

“Virtual” demo Setting up an assignment Selecting a topic Reviewing Feedback from author to reviewer Teammate review 02/09/10

Let’s review a wiki page 02/09/10

Click on the assignment … 02/09/10

… then on “Others’ work” 02/09/10

Read the submitted wiki page 02/09/10

Then fill out the review template 02/09/10

Save and view the review 02/09/10

Now the reviewee logs in … 02/09/10

… and views the scores 02/09/10

Click on “View” to expand review 02/09/10

Notice the link down at the bottom 02/09/10

Use it to give feedback to the reviewer 02/09/10

Then the reviewer can view the feedback 02/09/10

Summary of feedback in Expertiza Reviews Feedback to author Teammate reviews Metareviews ( x reviews y ’s review of z ) 02/09/10

How to motivate students? Runners in a race are motivated by seeing other runners ahead of them. Players in online games are motivated to catch the leaders. Can we do the same thing in our peer-review system? 02/09/10

Motivating Students: Achievement System Categories in we can track achievement Quality of submitted work Quality of reviews Helpfulness to authors Contribution to team These factors make up reputation. 02/09/10

Recognizing Achievement: Leaderboards Students can list their achievements for all to see. 02/09/10 Your feedback welcome: http://tinyurl.com/expertiza

Now a new review is entered … 02/09/10

… and the leaders change 02/09/10

A new metareview is entered … 02/09/10

… and a new leader is recognized 02/09/10

What we have here is … a social network! Connections among many individuals. Information contributed from many sources (albeit coerced!) Can be used to discover competencies of individuals. 02/09/10

Future work: Message boards for extra credit Student a posts a question Student b responds Student a rates student b ’s response Others can rate response too. TAs can also respond Prompt reviews/answers are more helpful, so reward for these … 02/09/10

New Features Coming to Expertiza Levels “ Special power”―rearranging messages Microtasks/micropayments … incentivize useful work 02/09/10

Outline The goal: Authentic assessment Virtual demo Student-generated content Social networking and game mechanics Reputation systems Summary 02/09/10

Are the evaluations reliable? Author feedback Metareviewing helps. Algorithmic strategies 02/09/10

Algorithmic approaches Strategies use quality and leniency as metrics for assigning grades. Quality is dependent on leniency, and vice versa. Their approach yields a system of simultaneous equations, which can be solved to yield values for quality. Other researchers have devised similar methodologies. 02/09/10

Other reputation systems What we have seen are “reputation systems” devoted to evaluating required work. Other reputation system deal with voluntary work. Our hope is to blend the two. 02/09/10

Summary If students do “real” tasks, authentic assessment is possible. Peer assessment provides a scalable approach to authentic assessment. Incentives such as leaderboards and micropayments can be used to encourage student contributions. A reputation system is needed for quality control. 02/09/10

Using Game Mechanics & Social Networking

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