Intro

Wicked Problem Part B

1. Part B: Describe its causes, its impact and its general wickedness in words and images. Create an audio and or visual media project that extends the words you have used to describe the problem. 
   
   

Wicked Problem Part A

Part A: Identify a wicked problem of practice in your classroom, school or workplace. 

The Problem
At my work my team utilizes technology to educate our Independent Business Owners (IBO's). We educate them on how to sell and what they are selling, as well as how to grow their business. However our audience ranges between several ages/generations, income levels, races/languages and technical capabilities. In my opinion we end up creating bland and un-engaging courses so that it "fits" the majority of our audience. So my Wicked Problem is trying to create courses that are engaging and are applicable to our wide range of learners.

Instructional strategies

I think that by incorporating game theory or gamification with our courses will produce a high level of engagement and a great user experience.

This is the main strategy that I would like to implement. This is where we have to decide rather to implement game theory or gamification. The difference between the two are:

Game Theory: Creating a course or lesson that incorporates the learning objective into a game.

Gamification: A system that rewards and keeps track of a learners progress throughout defined curriculum.

Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
According to research, recognition is most effective if it is contingent on the
achievement of a certain standard. Also, symbolic recognition works better
than tangible rewards.

Applications:
* Find ways to personalize recognition. Give awards for
individual accomplishments.

Pedagogy
games-based pedagogy
-Knowledge acquired through gaming experiences that encourage learners to reflect and abstract curriculum objectives.

The Content
Varies from product knowledge to learning business skills
Technology-integrated strategy
What I want to happen ideally:  In a perfect world we would hire a vendor to build us a secure system that interprets data such as courses accessed by individual users, scores, and "badges" earned based on a point system. There would also be a feature that would analyze the data for each learner and provide them with a dashboard where they would find their rankings, history, personal profile and suggested courses for them to take.

Realistically: We could start redesigning courses based on if they are due for review and recreate them using a game theory concept. This may not work for all courses but there are certainly courses that we could use to start breaking away from their linear pattern. To do this we really would not need any other technology than we already have. Depending on how non-linear our course pattern is we may find it useful to use the software Articulates Storyline, however I feel that by doing some more research and choosing our course and game wisely we could gamify a course easily by using the software we have called Lectora.

Logistics of a solution
Because of our business we work with a lot of branding and time sensitive graphics and prices. Amway constantly re-brands and adjusts imagery and prices in nearly all of their courses. However there are some courses that have not been reviewed by a designer in years. There are also courses that are more popular than others. We have monthly records that tell us how many times courses are viewed. To start implementing game theory we would need to look at all of our courses, determine which courses are the most popular/most useful to our users and which courses can be gamified. We do have some courses that just simply would not work in a non linear format.

We would also want to keep our teams objective of making our content mobile. This requires some additional thought when recreating the courses. They must be sized differently including images to fit a mobile device's screen. Also there are some features that are still flash that do not work on iOS devices. We would want to stay away from those features considering most of our audience uses an iOS device (iPad or iPhone).


The Technology 
There are services on the market that will create a gamification system for you. However we have a very private and elaborate system already in place and it would not be efficient for us to have two systems to manage.

We also could have a system built for us, like a dashboard of sorts, that uses our data to produce a personalized interface for each learner. This system would display things like leader boards, suggested content, awards earned from taking a set of curriculum etc.

Our cheapest and easiest option is just to adopt game theory into our courses. Organize content in such a way that the learner can experience, reflect and extrapolate the information in a seamless and engaging manner.


The Research

In the article “Raising engagement in e-learning through gamification” by Cristina Ioana Muntean, she explains the process of how to gamify e-learning courses and its benefits.

She says "In game psychology there can be identified several personality types. These types are: achievers, explorers, socializers and killers." I think this is great evidence that will support our decision in gamifying a course and still supporting our wide range of learners. Everyone has a little gamer in them.

In the article "Games and e-learning" by Donald Clark he says "Games grab attention and have the ability to really engage, an important issue in learning. Without attention little learning can take place."

He also lists Ten pedagogic reasons for games in learning:; 

• Motivation
• Learner-centricity
• Personalisation
• Incremental learning
• Contextualisation
• Rich media mix
• Safe failure
• Immediate feedback
• Lots of practice and reinforcement
• Lots of collaboration

And lastly he states "There are several pedagogic features that are strong in games, yet weak in traditional education and training. If we can isolate and apply these through e-learning, significant pedagogic progress will have been made.

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A plan based on research for implementation

For this project I will create a gamifed e-learning mini-course or a section of a course. I do not have the tools or resources to create a true gamification environment, but I can do my best to prove that game theory increases engagement and user experience.

Indications of a successful project

The indication that this will have been a successful project is that I will have created/ or recreated a course that incorporates game theory.

Relevant resources and citations

Clark, D. (n.d.). Games and e-learning. Retrieved January 19, 2013, from http://94.23.146.173/ficheros/6a1a1d2a2fbe095cd53beb3a11ba48b2.pdf

Muntean, C. I. (n.d.). Raising engagement in e-learning through gamification. Retrieved January 19, 2013, from http://www.icvl.eu/2011/disc/icvl/documente/pdf/met/ICVL_ModelsAndMethodologies_paper42.pdf