Blended Learning Theme

Use principles from video games in non-entertainment ways to make activities more motivating and engaging. Popular in the health and fitness world. You have an activity that you want your users to do more often and you have leaderboards for sense of competition and something to recognise achievement currently three missing ingredients. 1. Need to create meaning. Need to get benefit. Stack overflow valuable to user, foursquare no benefit but only achievements so people leave. Try to offer the user to bring their personal goals to the platform - mint.com or at least have customisable goals. At very least has to connect to interest or curiosity of user. Ensure you are connecting to a meaningful community of interest. Need to have bragging rights with your friends. Focused community boardgamegeek.com. So perhaps you can have community-generated goals. Video games have an overarching narrative and all your micro-goals feed into an overall goal. Missile command. only you can defend your city from nuclear bombs. Crowd sourcing to present political transperancy. Narratively frame this as discover corruption in your area, it becomes meaningful to you. You need to have supporting visuals and copy that cue you into the fictional world around you. The visual carries the story. with meaning there is a danger involved - aloha tries to encourage random acts of kindness. Degrading for the person you treat to act of kindness as they realise you are only doing it for points. Test your environment with non-geeky friends to make sure it doesn't seem awkward. Beware of social context meanings. 2. How to craft an experience so user can gain mastery Achievement is like a skinner box in games world. Progress wars - hit button to gain points, but is not motivating and engaging. fun is just another word for learning Koster, 2005. Fun in learning is the fun of mastering something, the act of solving puzzles and understanding something. why is school (solving maths) not fun and games invol

tips for 2.9, but still lots of good advice here

Bibliography of articles around online teaching with links to full articles

Allow the learner to exert some control over his or her own learning - This is the principle of "autonomy", a part of the self-determination theory of motivation. Learners who believe that they are the ones making choices and exercising control over what is happening to them demonstrate a higher level of engagement, persistence, and responsibility for learning as well as beliefs in their own accountability for whether they learn or not. This can be done by allowing learners to choose among alternative assignments or timing of their work. It can also be doing by encouraging learners to articulate their reasoning behind their choices. And most important, it is enhanced when the instructor allows the learners to make and then solve their own mistakes before jumping in to solve the problems for them. These four ideas are not particularly brilliant; you probably had thought of one or more of them in your own practice. Starting with benchmarks for self-regulated learning and activities that are valued by students, supporting student feelings of self-efficacy and competence, tailoring instruction to the students' starting understanding and building from there, an"