Gamification of Higher Education – But Not the Classroom
A professor starts their first day on the job as both an academic and a researcher – from this day until their last they will constantly be throwing away ideas that they cannot pursue – due to money, time, interest from immediate peers, incentives, design flaws in software/processes, etc.
A grant goes unapplied for because no one that could do something about it knows about it, or they are not researchers, or they don’t have the support/confidence to even apply for it.
A student teacher notices a trend in their classes – an issue that the students know about and the faculty ignore because the administration can’t easily solve – they have no mechanism for pursuing this and the potential solution remains undiscovered.
Faculty need more than just annual encouragement to work together on research assignments, student teachers need more than just a syllabus and a paycheck, grants can be more heavily advertised and leveraged – but the tendency to get authoritative while applying authority to these endeavors can often spoil the experience for the participants – and end up defeating any new endeavor.
Well then, that’s a lot of nebulous handwringing on my part – what’s the solution? For me it is almost always drawn from games. 🙂
Creating an Idea Forum/ Quest Hub
The professor from the first example is given access to the digital idea board or forum or whatever where they can post their unpursued ideas for others to work on – include an option for future collaboration. Faculty that are interested in joining a research group can search the board for interesting ideas – or they can just add information/more ideas to the existing postings.
Grant offices would need to be heavily involved in this so that they could be following up with any of the research groups that are ready to get started – or are just lacking funding.
The student teacher from the example could also access all of these idea boards or forums and enabling an Anonymous area for posts allows for them to share the information without attaching it to their experience and faculty mentor. Researchers and grant providers may be able to find and fund solutions to the unsolvable problems that get buried in academia – simply because of who notices the problems.
This has to mean something to everyone involved beyond altruism. I told a group of researchers earlier this month – Altruism is not something you can replicate, but selfishness is universal.
We must use selfishness to fuel the endeavors that we want our faculty and students to participate in.
Examples could include:
- All faculty interactions in the idea board or forum should count toward their professional development.
- Student teachers could either be paid for their feedback directly or they could have certificates issued to them by the relevant departments at that university.
- Interactions in the forum would build up into publishable research over time – with all assisting faculty attached.
- Classroom Simulation and Pilot Testing
If you want people to work – then you should pay them.
Following up on research leads, tracking down colleagues that you think might have more information, doing their own experiments – all of these things take time and money away from faculty and we cannot expect them to do them for free just because they are traditionally seen as altruistic.
If you want our faculty to be altruistic then create a society that allows for it. No, this is a capitalist society and those systems work just fine* and we can implement them into processes with the confidence that they are layered on top of the existing interests of faculty, grant offices and providers, and student teachers.
I managed to leave out all of the quest givers, tavern rumors, and level one adventuring parties references while writing this. I had to save something for the next one, I guess.
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