A Rotman researcher breaks down gamification in education

The Person: Prof. Dilip Soman, self-described (as per his Twitter profile) optimist, anecdotist and multi-tasker. No kidding on the multi-tasking; he’s a marketing professor who holds the Corus Chair in Communications Strategy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Soman is also director of the India Innovation Institute, co-director of the Executive Centre for Excellence in Social CRM and co-author of the book Flux: What Marketing Managers Need to Navigate the New Environment.

“I’m what is called a behavioural economist,” says Soman. “I study economic decision making through the lens of psychology, primarily in the financial well-being domain … but also in the context of healthcare and well-being in general, like healthy eating. We’re trying to understand how (individual) people make choices vs. the economy as a whole and how can we actually influence those choices. Behavioural change is really what I’m interested in within different domains.”

The Project: Soman’s latest research looks at how gamification can be applied most effectively in education and training. His goal, he says, was to add quantifiable, evidence-based research depth to an emerging field that’s still top-heavy with theory.

“The challenge is that (gamification’s) a new science. We haven’t had this for many years. So there’s a lack of empirical research on this stuff,” says Soman.

“We thought, let’s try and look at successful cases where people have gamified education and break down how they went about it and almost write a guide book about it. That’s what we’ve done in this particular piece. So they’ll now know how to start the process (of gamifying education).”

The Progress: In December 2013, Soman and colleague Wendy Hsin-Yuan Huang published their findings in the research paper “A Practitioner’s Guide to Gamification of Education.” Based on five case studies from the real world, the authors lay out five key steps to deploying gamification in education and training. Among the juicier takeaways: games can’t (and shouldn’t) replace human teachers entirely. And those social leader boards publicly displaying player standings – turns out they can backfire by discouraging some students from playing at all. That’s a shame, literally.

Soman’s not done playing in the gamification research sandbox just yet. Over the coming year, he’ll run new experiments in the lab and online to further test the effectiveness of rewards, levels, badges and other strategies. “We need to construct real life situations and track all these success stories,” Soman says.

The Prospects: Soman is a big proponent of open source research, so commercialization isn’t his ultimate goal. Yes, outside suitors have already come calling to float the idea of commercialization with him. But Soman has so far rebuffed them all. “I think it’s too early…without enough empirical evidence,” he says. Still, he concedes that one day a commercial software program could potentially come out of his research, automating the experiments to isolate the effective gamification strategies from the weaker ones with greater probable accuracy and speed.

The Passion: The ability to do research that can help people fairly quickly keeps Soman pursuing behavioural science. “Because most of my research is about helping people help themselves, it’s interesting,” says Prof. Soman. “And with the study of behavioural change, you can actually see the results of your research very quickly. In most of my work you can actually see results within six months. I (help) economists who’ve tried to change behaviour for years and years…and suddenly it starts changing behaviour quickly.”