Open Education 2016

How do we slay the GOBLINs of traditional instruction and use open educational resources (OER) to instill new pedagogies? As we move beyond content delivery as the paradigm for education and the textbook as the posterchild for OER, can we reintroduce play and with it the motivations accompanying agency and personal growth into professional development and the classroom?

Games Offer Bold Learning Insights Nowadays (http://goblin.keeganslw.net) or GOBLIN is an open, interactive adventure game built as a vehicle to experientially teach and learn. GOBLIN combines professional development, storytelling, and a role-playing game into a faculty development opportunity for instructors at the University of Oklahoma.



Traditional approaches to gamification in education have relied on badges and extrinsic motivations. Instead, GOBLIN baked elements of gamification-including agency, personalized feedback, and collaboration-into the gameplay to engage participants in metacognitive reflection.



Taking a commercial approach to building a game or gamifying an entire class can be expensive and time consuming. GOBLIN consists of an in-person workshop, a table-top role playing game, a website, and a participant-curated collection of resources. By repurposing the public domain assets of an open source video game (https://www.glitchthegame.com/) and using open source tools, we developed the multi-modal components of GOBLIN in a free and replicable model. However, this was not without its challenges. For instance, the limited nature of open artwork meant that it was hard to present diversity (both in terms of gender and race) within our fantasy world.



The gamified GOBLIN workshops offered an experiential faculty development opportunity demonstrating the utility of play as motivation. Being in the GOBLIN game, allowed us as instructors to approach games in education from a critical perspective. Interaction within the workshop and our post-course study reflect strong faculty engagement. Twenty-one participants produced more than two hundred reflections, blog posts, and curated resources-all of which were optional assignments-and they have integrated gamification and open resources into their own courses (see http://goblin.keeganslw.net/participant-responses/).



In this presentation, we will present the gameplay and faculty experience of GOBLIN. Like GOBLIN, our presentation will use gamification to open a dialogue on the role of gamification and open pedagogy in professional development, instructional design, and the classroom. And of course, we need your help to defeat the GOBLIN!