Serious Games as edX MOOC Activities Manuel Freire, Ángel del Blanco, Baltasar

Fernández-Manjónbalta@fdi.ucm.es ; @baltaFM

http://www.slideshare.net/BaltasarFernandezManjon

Outline• Goal: Serious Game integration into MOOC• Motivation:

– best of both worlds• MOOC: huge potential audience,

motivation & analytics present problems• SG: adds motivation, improved analytics

(if we can manage the data influx)– both are growing. Can they complement each other?– more users => significant research

• Outcomes:– proof-of-concept– map of integration strategies

Why focus on edX?

– Popular (big 3: Coursera, edX, Udacity)

– Open-source (easier to develop, welcoming GitHub community)

– Growth perspectiveMOOC.org: google partnership, "1st half of 2014"

– Rich activitiesmolecule editor, foldit integration, circuit editor, LON-CAPA support...

why use eAdventure?

sec. education healthcare accessibility language training

Rich activitiesedX eAdventure

Author ad-hoc XML within edX Studio eAdventure Editor

Run XModule / XBlock eAdventure Engine

Analyzebasic completion reports +

ad-hoc +Analytics ???

Gleaner (game analytics)

Modular activities in edX: great expectations

• The activity itself– XModules (old)– XBlocks (new; WIP; standardized environment)

• Analysis of the activities' results– Ad-hoc reporting + basic completion (old)– Insights (new; very much WIP)

(we expected both projects to be further along by now...)

A happy XBlock

• Runtimes (auth., LMS, appengine) provide– storage (=state)– url-mapping (=location, callback support)– analytics

• each XBlock provides– views

(returns HTML fragments; may include authoring view)

– handlers (typically AJAX)– structure (hierarchy of children)

Integration: runtime & reporting• eAdventure "assessment profile":

generated feedback• Minimal integration:

report back global outcomes

• Multi-level integration:each section reports as a "different" activity

• Low-level integration:report back everything

Authoring integration in edX Studio

Authoring reporting in eAdventure

The assessment profile panel. For the selected assessment rule, (a) is a condition over the game state that triggers the rule, while (b) is the information included in the assessment report, and (c) are the pair attribute-values to be sent to the LMS-MOOC.

Collecting game LAs from MOOCs

• Thousands of concurrent users = lots of data– Redundancy: keep local copy, keep trying to send

updates until ack (w/ exponential backoff)– Depth: send most important data first– Server-side: write-optimized databases highly

recommended (Cassandra, Mongo, ...)• Not yet tested in proof-of-concept• One of the most promising aspects

Conclussion

• Definitely possible to integrate SGs into MOOCs

• edX is still a moving target– Very active development– Docs < Mailing-list

• Other paths available– LTI wrapper

Gamification

• Award "completion badges" for in-game activities

• Complementary to traditional educational objectives

• Self-assessment, status

... but not just for gamesPopular in games ...

Future work

• Exploring all the possibilities of LON-CAPA• Advance beyond proof-of-concept– Create a self-contained XBlock

(at multi-level integration) – Test it in an open edX MOOC– Add edX-activity deployment to eAdventure 2.0

• Test– Reporting with thousands of simultaneous users– Game evolution based on LA results– Peer-to-peer game-trace grading?

Questions / Comments?