educon 2014-sgs-as-mooc-activities
TRANSCRIPT
Serious Games as edX MOOC Activities Manuel Freire, Ángel del Blanco, Baltasar
Fernández-Manjó[email protected] ; @baltaFM
http://www.slideshare.net/BaltasarFernandezManjon
Outline• Goal: Serious Game integration into MOOC• Motivation:
– best of both worlds• MOOC: huge potential audience,
motivation & analytics present problems• SG: adds motivation, improved analytics
(if we can manage the data influx)– both are growing. Can they complement each other?– more users => significant research
• Outcomes:– proof-of-concept– map of integration strategies
Why focus on edX?
– Popular (big 3: Coursera, edX, Udacity)
– Open-source (easier to develop, welcoming GitHub community)
– Growth perspectiveMOOC.org: google partnership, "1st half of 2014"
– Rich activitiesmolecule editor, foldit integration, circuit editor, LON-CAPA support...
why use eAdventure?
sec. education healthcare accessibility language training
Rich activitiesedX eAdventure
Author ad-hoc XML within edX Studio eAdventure Editor
Run XModule / XBlock eAdventure Engine
Analyzebasic completion reports +
ad-hoc +Analytics ???
Gleaner (game analytics)
Modular activities in edX: great expectations
• The activity itself– XModules (old)– XBlocks (new; WIP; standardized environment)
• Analysis of the activities' results– Ad-hoc reporting + basic completion (old)– Insights (new; very much WIP)
(we expected both projects to be further along by now...)
A happy XBlock
• Runtimes (auth., LMS, appengine) provide– storage (=state)– url-mapping (=location, callback support)– analytics
• each XBlock provides– views
(returns HTML fragments; may include authoring view)
– handlers (typically AJAX)– structure (hierarchy of children)
Integration: runtime & reporting• eAdventure "assessment profile":
generated feedback• Minimal integration:
report back global outcomes
• Multi-level integration:each section reports as a "different" activity
• Low-level integration:report back everything
Authoring integration in edX Studio
Authoring reporting in eAdventure
The assessment profile panel. For the selected assessment rule, (a) is a condition over the game state that triggers the rule, while (b) is the information included in the assessment report, and (c) are the pair attribute-values to be sent to the LMS-MOOC.
Collecting game LAs from MOOCs
• Thousands of concurrent users = lots of data– Redundancy: keep local copy, keep trying to send
updates until ack (w/ exponential backoff)– Depth: send most important data first– Server-side: write-optimized databases highly
recommended (Cassandra, Mongo, ...)• Not yet tested in proof-of-concept• One of the most promising aspects
Conclussion
• Definitely possible to integrate SGs into MOOCs
• edX is still a moving target– Very active development– Docs < Mailing-list
• Other paths available– LTI wrapper
Gamification
• Award "completion badges" for in-game activities
• Complementary to traditional educational objectives
• Self-assessment, status
... but not just for gamesPopular in games ...
Future work
• Exploring all the possibilities of LON-CAPA• Advance beyond proof-of-concept– Create a self-contained XBlock
(at multi-level integration) – Test it in an open edX MOOC– Add edX-activity deployment to eAdventure 2.0
• Test– Reporting with thousands of simultaneous users– Game evolution based on LA results– Peer-to-peer game-trace grading?
Questions / Comments?