What economic theory says...

I know some people (well two) have become interested in this blog becuase of my involvement in the Coursera course on Gamification. Sadly, I have to inform those two loyal readers that I can take no more...

I now understand that Pennsylvania is an ivy league university because it will send you up the wall...

This clip was the last straw. If you can't see what is wrong with this can I either suggest a DVD box set of "In the Midnight Garden" or that an economist once ran off with your partner.

The course are videos of Professor Werbach as a talking head. He puts in quips, which seem to go down well with students on the fora, but I can't help thinking it is like a speak-your-weight machine ploughing through material they are not completely familiar with.

How did the clip linked above get said in the first place? How did it survive quality assurance? I would suspect the answers are "Prof Werbach is saying words he doesn't understand" and "there is no quality assurance".

I suppose that what he was trying to say is that "economic theory suggests people are indiffenrent between losing 50k and a 50% chance of losing 100k", but what he said was miles away form that even with slips of language. But even so, what is this "economic theory" that assumes linear utility curves, which would be lines rather than curves. How can even accoutning students understand CAPM if anyone has ever implied that utility functions are linear? All economic theory, from economics 1 onwards, assumes that people have non-linear utility functions. If this is anything that is being dragged up as a straw man to be ritually immolated, it is not "economic theory", it is naive dcecision theory. And Professor Werbach is so not even close to expressing this cogently...

As a platform Coursera is slightly condensed vapour-ware... the fora are full of students raising technical problems, most signitficantly  with acccessing with IE and last weekend the site lost the registrations of all the students, forcing them to re-register. The peer reviewing of coursework is a mess.

God alone knows why the University of Edinburgh are in partnership with this shambles.

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.