Chicago eLearning & Technology Showcase Presentation

1. The Path to Mastery Using Serious Games
In developing my graduate course on Serious Games at DePaul University, I conducted a
year-long study on some of the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and
assessments:
Can we encourage adults to experience failure in the spirit of learning?
Can we build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process?
Can we help adults further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative
problem-solving? This session will address these questions and more.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to
-Encourage adults to experience failure in the spirit of learning
-Build reflection and immediate feedback loops into the learning process
-Help adults to further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative
problem-solving
AUGUST 18, 2015 | NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY CHICAGO CAMPUS
https://www.discoursellc.com/blog/

3. Michelle King, Professional Learning Executive Director, Lewisville Independent School District

4. The Second Machine Age
What is it and why does it matter?
Andrew McAfee: The Industrial Revolution was when humans overcame the limitations of
our muscle power. We’re now in the early stages of doing the same thing to our mental
capacity—infinitely multiplying it by virtue of digital technologies. There are two
discontinuous changes that will stick in historians’ minds. The first is the development of
artificial intelligence, and the kinds of things we’ve seen so far are the warm-up act for
what’s to come. The second big deal is the global interconnection of the world’s population,
billions of people who are not only becoming consumers but also joining the global pool
of innovative talent.
Erik Brynjolfsson: The First Machine Age was about power systems and the ability to move
large amounts of mass. The Second Machine Age is much more about automating and
augmenting mental power and cognitive work. Humans were largely complements for the
machines of the First Machine Age. In the Second Machine Age, it’s not so clear whether
humans will be complements or machines will largely substitute for humans; we see
examples of both. That potentially has some very different effects on employment, on
incomes, on wages, and on the types of companies that are going to be successful.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/artificial_intelligence_meets_the_c-suite

5. Man and machine
I think we’re finally getting at that seminal moment in human history when we can talk
to our machines and our machines will understand us in regular, natural language. It’s
a little clunky if you use Siri or some of the automated voice-response systems. At first,
you’re kind of amazed by a few things you can do, but you quickly run into the
boundaries and it can be a little frustrating. But it’s advancing very, very rapidly.
Productivity paradox
Innovation has never been faster. And in fact, if you look at the underlying statistics,
productivity growth is doing pretty well. Productivity levels are at an all-time high, and
in the 2000s, productivity growth was faster than it was in the 1990s, which was a
great decade.
There is no economic law that says that technological progress needs to benefit
everybody, or even that it needs to benefit a majority of people. It’s entirely possible for
technology to advance, to make the pie bigger, and yet for some people to get a smaller
share of that pie.
A conversation with MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/charting_technologys_new_directions_a_conversation_with_mits_erik_brynjolfsson
But:

6. http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/see-results-learning-remembering-survey/

7. http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/see-results-learning-remembering-survey/

8. Gamification places non-game experiences into a game-like environment.
Serious games, however, are educational experiences specifically designed to deliver
formative or summative assessments, based on pre-determined learning objectives.
Gamification creates an experience; Serious Games promote task or concept mastery. The
underlying aim of Serious Games concentrates the user’s effort on the mastery of a specific
task, with a feedback loop to inform the user of their progress towards that goal.
“How quickly can I get into Gaming?”
Gamification: one of the hottest
topics in corporate learning today,
yet fraught with pitfalls.
http://www.clomedia-digital.com/read-clo/may_2015?sub_id=PaJxZM9LkoWJ#pg19

9. It may sound trite, but for us educational games are first and foremost games. Whether a
bona-fide contest with logical rules and a winning condition, or a Sim City-style sandbox
playtoy, a game experience needs to have certain basic elements to be a meaningful
experience for players. These elements include interactivity designed with clarity of input
and output; short-term and long-term goals to shape the player’s experience, a well-designed
ramp for beginners to learn the ropes; and a game structure that actually contains the possibly
of genuine play, not just quiz-style questions and answers.
Why emphasize what seems so obvious? Because many times we’ve seen educators entering
into game development that are content to transfer the style of games onto educational tasks
without understanding the substance of what makes a game work. And without these
fundamentals, the end experience can be dead in the water. What exactly creates that elusive
feeling of “play?” No one really knows. And it varies from game to game. But experienced
game designers are probably the best-equipped folks to bring it into your project.
http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/learningtoplay.html

11. The Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom's Revised Taxonomy
In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised Bloom's
Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001. Key to this is the use of verbs
rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy.
They are arranged below in increasing order, from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order
Thinking Skills (HOTS).
This categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives. His taxonomy
follows the thinking process. You can not understand a concept if you do
not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts
if you do not understand them.
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+-+Introduction

20. Learning from our failures – transferring the lessons of a failed
experience to a future experience (Argote & Todorova, 2007) –
is a fundamental component of individuals’ lives, particularly at work.
Failure is a bedrock of workplace learning processes (Lapré & Nembhard,
2011), as the dynamism of the work environment generates a host of
failed experiences to which individuals must respond and adapt,
such as the failure of a new product initiative or the failure of an
existing strategy to meet changing organizational and environmental
demands.
My Bad!' How Internal Attribution and Ambiguity of Responsibility Affect Learning from Failure
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2426674

21. The most important benefits of gaming are:
* Failure is accepted and recognized as a benefit to mastery;
* The player is rewarded with appropriate and timely feedback;
* The player makes social connections and is made to feel part of something bigger than
oneself.
Failure in gaming is never personalized. In serious games, frequent feedback (when
accompanied by specific instruction) dramatically reduces the time to mastery. Since the
computer will record all data during the assessment, specific pathways to mastery can be
identified and offered to the learner. This feedback loop leads to self-reflection, which
recent research calls “a powerful mechanism by which experience is translated into
learning. In particular, we find that individuals perform significantly better on
subsequent tasks when they think about what they learned from the task they
completed.”
Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, Bradley Staats, Working Paper: Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance,
14-093, March 25, 2014
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-093_cf6e76d2-8e4b-466f-bf1c-e8d694afd2bc.pdf

22. Learning for Mastery. Instruction and Curriculum. Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia,
Topical Papers and Reprints, Number 1. Bloom, Benjamin S. Evaluation Comment, v1 n2 May 1968
Most students, perhaps over 90 percent, can master what teachers have to teach them, and
it is the task of instruction to find the means which will enable students to master the subject
under consideration. A basic task is to determine what is meant by mastery of the subject and
to search for methods and materials which will enable the largest proportion of students to
attain such mastery. That is, the basic task in education is to find strategies which will take
individual differences into consideration but in such a way as to promote the fullest
development of the individual.

23. Wouters, P., van Nimwegen, C., van Oostendorp, H., & van der Spek, E. D. (2013, February
4). A Meta-Analysis of the Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Serious Games. Journal of
Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0031311
Research Studies
Additional moderator analyses on the learning effects revealed that learners in serious
games learned more, relative to those taught with conventional instruction methods,
when the game was supplemented with other instruction methods, when multiple
training sessions were involved, and when players worked in groups.
Stizmann, T. (2011) A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of
Computer-based Simulation Games. Personnel Pyschology, 64, pp. 489-528.
Consistent with theory, post training self- efficacy was 20% higher, declarative knowledge
was 11% higher, procedural knowledge was 14% higher, and retention was 9% higher for
trainees taught with simulation games, relative to a comparison group.
Connolly, T. M., Boyle, E. A., MacArthur, E., Hainey, T., and Boyle, J. M. (2012)A systematic
literature review of empirical evidence on computer games and serious games. Computers
& Education 59, pp. 661–686.
The findings revealed that playing computer games is linked to a range of perceptual,
cognitive, behavioral, affective and motivational impacts and outcomes. The most
frequently occurring outcomes and impacts were knowledge acquisition/content
understanding and affective and motivational outcomes.
http://karlkapp.com/abstracts-of-three-meta-analysis-studies-of-serious-games/

24. Former Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,
Constance Steinkuehler, commented, “For the first time ever, we have a clear picture
of the nationwide landscape of higher education video game programs and the results
are exciting. The growth of the domain across universities and colleges, coupled with
the quantity and diversity of students we attract and keep, clearly demonstrate the
strength and relevance of our dynamic and developing field.”
March 2, 2015 — Today, the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (The Alliance)
unveiled Our State of Play, the first comprehensive nationwide survey of college and
university videogame design programs. Among the key findings from 73 participating
colleges and universities are that video game programs have greater gender diversity,
by nearly a two to one margin, than other computer science and STEM related
programs, and have significantly higher retention rates than the national average for
all undergraduate and graduate majors.
http://www.higheredgames.org/

25. Military organizations have been using games to train their officers and predict possible
outcomes of future battles since the Prussian Army began using the game “Kriegsspiel” some
200 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)).
http://blog.scmglobe.com/?p=2169
“This shouldn’t be surprising if we accept the notion that games are a biological adaptation
in mammals to gain survival skills. In nature, play is the activity of practicing survival skills in
low-urgency situations that can then be used in high-urgency, life-and-death situations. This
is exactly the way the military uses war-games.”
War-games seek to literally replicate and recreate history. So the data used in war-games for
terrain, logistics, weapons capabilities, etc. needs to be as accurate as possible.

26. SCM Globe is a serious supply chain game, and like war-games, it uses real world data,
and it uses a map of the world as its game board. This is shown in the screenshots below.
These screenshots show the model of an actual supply chain for a company that makes
furniture in Indonesia and sells to customers around the world. This model is created by
defining four types of supply chain entities (products, facilities, vehicles, and routes) and
placing them on a map of the world. They are the game pieces in this supply chain game.
http://www.scmglobe.com/user_sessions/new

27. Serious games and simulations have been used in computer-based flight simulators since
the 1960’s. Full Flight Simulators (FFS) are a shining example of mastery learning using
serious games. These simulations are the highest standard and eligible for zero flight time
(ZFT) training of civil pilots when converting from one airliner type to another.

28. https://as01.simcoach.org/simcoach/index.html

29. http://www.allencomm.com/portfolio/toyota/

30. http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/

31. http://gameslearningsociety.org/econauts_microsite/

32. http://www.schellgames.com/schell-games-awarded-1-million-to-transform-molecular-chemistry-education/

33. http://www.seriousgamesnews.com/

34. http://www.seriousgamesdirectory.com/

35. http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/category/learning-games/

36. http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/category/learning-games/

37. http://www.eship.ox.ac.uk/business-model-canvas-explained

38. http://richardcarey.net/

39. Why compliance is killing e-learning
E-learning producers are in a difficult position, because a great deal of their work comes in
the form of compliance training (according to Charles Jennings, 80% of all e-learning produced
in Australia is to meet compliance needs). But in the long run they must surely feel the effects
of a poor user experience:
Employees hate doing compliance training
As a result, trainers hate training it
Some time ago, Tom Kuhlmann posted about Those Pesky Compliance Courses, making the
point that these aren't usually performance based and therefore a 'course' is probably not
what's really required; he recommends keeping them simple, putting a test up front so those
who already know the rules can exempt themselves from the body of the material, and
un-locking all the navigation, so no-one's forced to sit through something they don't need.
All good advice, but only assuming the whole process is just one of getting boxes ticked
to satisfy an external regulator. If the material is really not relevant, then it makes sense to
make the box-ticking exercise as painless as possible, like renewing your passport or some
similar administrative chore.

40. One of the strengths of serious games is that it provides visible milestones of the student’s
mastery of content in real time (when it is well designed). Too often in an instructional setting,
the learner doesn’t know whether or not he or she really understands or can apply the
knowledge they are learning. There is often no visible sign of mastery of the content or
application of the content.
The basic concept of mastery learning is that content is organized into discrete units
where complete mastery is required before moving to the next unit, the method of moving
through the instruction is based on ungraded assignments or instructional tasks with
formative evaluation as a tool for identifying what is learned and what is yet to be learned
and then providing additional support for concepts that have not been mastered.
(Bloom, 1971; Melton, 2008).
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/gamification-shows-learner-visible-signs-learning/

41. Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures.
“Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably
linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does
in the United States. Bankruptcy codes are far more punitive, in contrast to the United States,
where bankruptcy is simply a rite of passage for many successful entrepreneurs.
Professor Moser recalled that a businessman who had to declare bankruptcy in her hometown
in Germany committed suicide. “In Europe, failure is regarded as a personal tragedy,” she said.
“Here it’s something of a badge of honor. An environment like that doesn’t encourage as
much risk-taking and entrepreneurship.”
When David Byttow, co-founder of the anonymous social app Secret, announced this spring
that he was shutting down the San Francisco-based start-up, he didn’t seem the least bit
chastened. “I believe in failing fast in order to go on and make only new and different
mistakes,” he wrote in a blog post.
There is also little or no stigma in Silicon Valley to being fired; Steve Jobs himself was forced
out of Apple. “American companies allow their employees to leave and try something else,”
Professor Moser said. “Then, if it works, great, the mother company acquires the start-up.
If it doesn’t, they hire them back. It’s a great system. It allows people to experiment and try
things. In Germany, you can’t do that. People would hold it against you. They’d see it as
disloyal. It’s a very different ethic.”
A Fearless Culture Fuels U.S. Tech Giants
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/business/the-american-way-of-tech-and-europes.html?_r=0

42. The only thing more dangerous
than trying too hard and failing …
… is not trying hard enough
and succeeding !
Michelangelo 1503

43. https://www.discoursellc.com/blog/