Coursera Gamification Course

Coursera is very much flavour of the month. Set up by Ng and Koller from Stanford University in April, the model is to take courses from prestigious universities and deliver them free to the World. Even Edinburgh University has jumped on the Coursera bandwagon, with Austin Tate from our School of Informatics involved in launching a course on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Sian Bayne and Hamish Macleod from our School of Education involved in a course on E-Learning and Digitial Cultures, both scheduled to start in January.

Lacking the patience to wait until January but driven by curiosity to see how a course can be delivered free I have enrolled in the course run by Kevin Werbach at the University of Pennsylvania on Gamification. The range of content is interesting, giving a general overview, but the presentation is very conventional, with short video presentations of Kevin Werbach in front of a book case in a subsidiary window and powerpoint slides in the main window, with pen-applied highlighting.  He delivers the content well. But the bookcase is a bit of a distraction, especially becuase, and this is flagged up for the terminally unobservant, the items on the shelves change between videos and we are invited to work out what this dynamic set-dressing means. I find watching academics speaking in front of bookcases distracting enough. It gives the impression of erudition, but I cant help trying to work out what the books are, and by the time I have worked them out I have lost the thread of what the person is saying. Having video lectures where students are encouraged to scan the shelves seems almost designed to distract students with incipient ADHD. The multiple choice elements that are added are so simple that they could be used as tests for brain-stem function, or be used as premium-line phone-in quiz questions on day-time television, which is pretty much the same thing.

The question my business studies friends would ask about a free online course is "what is the business model to pay for it?" and the answer, as my economics chums would predict, is "deliver it with zero marginal cost". So the assessments and final examination are multiple choice and the essay elements will be peer assessed. However, the course, even on only its second day, has been useful, allowing me to identify through the course's discussion fora some developers of serious gaming in business that I wasn't aware of. So it might well be that it is the social network/crowdsourcing aspects of these courses that give them value rather than the content of the materials themselves.