Gamification can be a great way to try something new in your courses while giving the students a completely different learning experience. Through gamified assessments and interactive activities, students can not only gauge their progress instantly but also take ownership of their learning journey. By incorporating elements such as real-time feedback, collaborative opportunities, and personalized learning paths, you can create a dynamic and engaging environment that promotes active participation and skill development. 

Leveraging tools like H5P in Moodle enables instructors to choose from a wide range of options to tailor the experience to suit specific learning objectives. These activities can be embedded elements easily and directly into your course. If you are interested in implementing gamification in your classes, don't hesitate to reach out to an instructional designer for additional support and guidance by either emailing [email protected] or scheduling an appointment with an instructional designer.

Enhancing the Learning Experience with Gamification  

If you are unsure where to start when it comes to gamification, start by having a conversation with your students to discover which video games or even board games they like. From there, you can consider which H5P activity in Moodle or external game you can modify to meet your course needs. After you choose a game, state the learning objectives and communicate these goals and expectations to students. 

With the suggestions listed below, you can harness the power of gamification to create a dynamic and engaging learning environment for students. Using H5P activities in Moodle gives you several choices to embed gamification elements directly in your course. With H5P instructors have the option to create crossword puzzles, branching scenarios, memory games, and much more. 

Add Rewards/Recognition and Enable Tracking Progress

Consider specific milestones that align with your curriculum or module and add game-like features such as points, badges, and leaderboards. Enabling students to track their progress using data and analytics within Moodle can help you and your students access their performance data and identify areas of improvement. Instructors can use a page in Moodle or a Google doc to post a leaderboard with points. If you plan on posting a leaderboard, you can give students a nickname or screen name like in a video game to keep things anonymous. 

Create Personalized Learning Paths

Creating opportunities for students to facilitate their own learning connected to their own interests can introduce storytelling elements that create a narrative around the learning content. You can develop scenarios or case studies that immerse students in real-world applications. Integrating multimedia elements, such as videos, simulations, or virtual reality, can also enhance engagement.

A great option for a personalized learning path is through an H5P activity called a branching scenario. The branching scenario serves almost as a choose-your-own adventure game where students will choose an answer and based on their answer, they encounter a specific path; if they choose a different answer, they encounter other content. Here is an example of a branching scenario with H5P.

Employ Gamified Assessments

To design assessments with automated feedback, you can use interactive quizzes, puzzles, or simulations for real-time evaluation. Automated feedback is great for faculty and students because it saves faculty time and gives students immediate feedback on their performance and progress. H5P and Moodle quizzes are both great options for automated feedback.

Resources 

Introduction to the Use of Gamification in Higher Education from the University of Chicago

Gamification and Game-Based Learning from the University of Waterloo

Related Teaching Tips 

Why you might want to roll the dice and consider adding game-based learning to your course

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About the Author

Chad Bousley is an Instructional Designer at e-LIS, who helps faculty with online course design, creating interactive activities and implementing online teaching best practices. Outside of the classroom, Chad enjoys learning foreign languages and playing guitar.

Edited by Rachel Smydra, Faculty Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Image by Matthias Groenveld. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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University is a time of transition: for younger students newly out of high school, it is the transition toward adulthood, independence, agency, and identity development. While these can be positive changes, they come with tremendous pressure. For other students, it is a transition of career identity that takes on additional life responsibilities. These compounding factors can challenge one’s wellness and ability to learn. Life needs are learning needs.

While excellent training opportunities can show us how to help people in crisis, we should also strive to build a culture of well-being in our courses to help students feel equipped to face temporary or deeply rooted mental health challenges.

Proactive Well-Being Steps

Prepare multiple communication points. 
A good first step is adding a mental health statement in the syllabus. Referring back to aspects of that statement in ways that are time appropriate further communicates your acknowledgement of mental health as an ongoing need. Some real-time or online messaging options include the following: 

1. Intermittently plan messages to maintain mental well-being, such as our student-audience learning tip: Essential Conditions for Learning and OU Resources for Student Immediate Needs.
2. Specify concerns that may come up related to the course activities (see Lisa Hawley’s examples in Recognizing and Addressing Student Mental Health Concerns).
3. If you use the Rec Center, tell students about going and how it helps aspects of your holistic health and work. Direct them to student well-being opportunities accordingly.
4. Remind students 1-2 times per semester of key information in the syllabus’ mental health statement.
5. Check in with students either through feedback or other activities. Asking questions that encourage students to reflect may provide them a space to articulate their current challenges and/or emotional state. 

Describe normal stress and anxiety. 
As students on their own for the first time, they may not acknowledge the importance of their mental and physical well-being and how these aspects lend themselves to navigating stress and anxiety. State that it is normal to experience academic struggles in college courses and validate the challenges students may face without glorifying toxic amounts of stress (e.g., pulling all-nighters, consuming high levels of substances to stay alert). You could indicate to students in your course that certain parts of the semester will be difficult but certain actions can help them persist. Two sections on “Test Jitters: Situational Anxiety” and “Chronic Anxiety” in Essential Conditions for Learning help students distinguish their anxious experiences.

Increase awareness of mental health struggle. 
While we want students to take a measured, cautious approach to their stress and anxiety, young adulthood is a common time for mental health issues to surface. Therefore, it can still go a long way to normalize the need to care for mental health. 

Share that students can take advantage of support groups offered by the Counseling Center to learn more about mental health, from managing anxiety to building social skills. For example, if your course requires giving a presentation or working in groups, you can share that these support groups build related skills.

Explicitly link physical well-being to mental well-being and academic performance.
Many studies show the importance of a good diet, movement, and sleep and how these aspects can influence learning. Consider how you can build such behaviors into a course. For example, give students a challenge: get 8 hours of sleep per night the week before an exam, showing how the benefits have been researched (Scullin, 2018). OU Rec Well can also help facilitate student well-being opportunities that you want to encourage. 

Identify learning stress bottlenecks, and fix them with OU partners.
In addition, consider how you can proactively reduce or balance stress in your course design and activity pacing. Work with CETL and the Academic Success Center to reduce students’ stress that can come with high-stakes assessments. Normalize academic success support early and often. 

Conclusion: Try Three

Some of these steps and resources likely resonate with you more than others; it may be because of your familiarity with these offices on campus, your own personal experiences, or the consistent problems you see your students encounter. From the strategies in this tip, identify and adapt three things that might help you build a culture of well-being in your courses.

References and Resources 

Select resources from Supporting Student Mental Health: Teaching Resources.

• Recognizing and Addressing Student Mental Health Concerns: Teaching Tip from Counseling Professor Lisa Hawley
• OU Resources for Student Immediate Needs
• Essential Behaviors and Conditions for Learning: Learning Tip for Students

Save and adapt a Google Doc version of this teaching tip.

About the Author

Written by Christina Moore, associate director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Ideas inspired by OU colleagues during the January 2023 discussion “Student Mental Health: Faculty on the Front Line.” Others may share and adapt this blog post under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

View all CETL Weekly Teaching Tips. Follow these and more on Facebook and LinkedIn.