Category: Process Posts

This week, my group finished making final edits and revisions. Throughout the term, and over the course of this project, we learned a lot about gamification and it’s impacts on learners. During the completion of this inquiry project, we discovered the benefits, downfaults, real-world examples, key-elements, and related theories related to gamification in online learning.

Reflecting on this, I realized how relevant gamification in learning is in online education. Recognizing that gamification can support pedagogy (when used correctly) was really interesting, especially since it can heavily support student learning outcomes.

My group worked really well together to complete this assignment, and I think we were all really pleased with the outcome. I was so glad to have a group that was all on the same page regarding our progression.

Overall, I had a great time learning about distributed and open learning throughout the term. This project was really engaging, and I learned a lot about a topic that I didn’t know much about prior to researching it more heavily. I look forward to seeing our final feedback!

This week, my learning pod met up to work on our free inquiry project. Our goal was to compile all of our research and notes to form the basis of our infographic. After splitting up the work, I finished my targeted aspects of the assignment, and added them to our Canva infographic.

Collectively, we made sure all of our sub-sections flowed and worked well together. We worked together to organize our inquiry project findings within our infographic in a way that was visually appealing.

One challenge we discovered was that some of our sections had a lot of information, which was hard to read. We fixed this by adding color to the headers, and breaking up the sub section by smaller topics/paragraphs.

This was a portion of the infographic I was working on. I utilized the signaling principle (from theories of multimedia learning) to make the headings obvious, increasing readability and making the text more scannable (rather than being one giant block of text).

After receiving suggestions from Colin last week too, we discussed how we wanted to show how our work connected to EDCI 339 learning outcomes. We decided to explicitly write how our infographic content related to learning outcomes within our text, making it obvious for readers.

After playing around with layouts, themes, text organization, and image input, we plan on re-visiting our infographic next week to make any final changes and make edits to the text. This final review session will be beneficial, as it will allow us to revise and proofread the project with a fresh view.

Our hope is that we will have the final project finished and ready to submit after making these final changes!

This week, my group started to do some more in depth planning and research surrounding our free inquiry project. After meeting up to discuss logistics, we determined what subtopics we are going to explore that support our general inquiry question.

Furthermore, we chose an infographic template on Canva that reflects our learning accurately. We decided that the best way for our group to complete the research portion was to each take on a few sections to complete, so each of us become well-versed in that area. The only challenge I see arising here is that it may be difficult to remain cohesive throughout, although we could solve this problem by sharing our chosen parts with each other.

Once the bulk of the research is complete, we plan on meeting up to figure out the visual logistics of our infographic. Below is a photo of the mocked up version we created to start organizing our findings.

This is one page of our infographic. We plan on having about three pages to contain all of the elements and references used in the creation of our project. As you can see, this is a rough draft. Colours, images, sections, and shapes are bound to change as we continue with our inquiry project journey!

After finishing up some initial planning and starting the project, we decided that we wanted to talk to Colin after our Wednesday class to make sure we weren’t missing anything to ensure success.

After our group discussion, we learned that the one thing we needed to demonstrate explicitly was how we were meeting course objectives within our project.

This will be a component that we will have to incorporate, and as a group will likely have to communicate regarding how we want to demonstrate this.

I think that for the most part, we are on track to complete this project on time and be successful in our delivery. We plan to meet later this week to put together most of the infographic, and re-assess our progress.

For our free inquiry project, my group decided to research the impacts of game-based learning. Specifically, we want to know if the use of gamification improves knowledge retention in online courses. We want to know how whether the use of gamification elements, such as badges, milestones, and leaderboards, actually boost user engagement and retention in online learning.

Another possible perspective we may look into is if gamification is beneficial, how do we ensure that it aligns with learning outcomes?

This is a diagram I found to demonstrate how gamification is justified as a helpful tool in learning. These techniques may make learning more exciting for students, and may even generate better retention.

Myself, Jayla, and Sydney (our learning pod) completed our proposal to lay the groundwork for the completion of our project. Since then, we have called/texted to determine specifics regarding our topic. This included the creation of a document via Google Docs to outline our research findings and notes.

After coming up with some subtopics and headings that we wanted to address, we brainstormed possible presentation methods. Ultimately, we decided on using Canva to create an infographic to display our findings. This way, we can use elements related to multimedia (such as the incorporation of images and diagrams alongside text) to enhance comprehension.

We plan on each researching a few components to optimize workflow and efficiency. Over the next week, our goal is to begin adding information to the document to kickstart deeper learning and research.

After that, we will look into choosing our infographic template, calling (or meeting in person) to work on the project, and communicating our plan with Colin to gain some feedback (to ensure we are on the right track).

I am looking forward to see where this project takes us to deeper our understanding of gamification in online learning!