How Fanshawe College used gamification to teach sustainability

When Wendy Wilson set about designing the first Massive Open Online Course for London, Ontario’s Fanshawe College, she knew that she’d have to come up with some way to keep the students engaged. “I’d dropped out of a lot of MOOCs myself,” says Wilson, the college’s eLearning Development Consultant. “So I thought: what would keep them in it?” Her solution: a little light gamification.

Wilson’s free six-week-long Applied Sustainability MOOC launched on May 13, and attracted 537 students from around the world. Although it was based on an existing flesh-and-blood course at the college, the online version was framed around 26 video interviews with sustainability experts, all of them conducted by Matt Farrell, a non-expert “Course Guide” who learned along with the students (Farrell teaches political science at Fanshawe). The course focused on practical areas of sustainable design, from wastewater management to walkable neighbourhoods and LEED certification.

Indeed, it was LEED certification that provided the inspiration for the course’s game design elements. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a system of ratings given to green buildings and neighbourhood developments. A building can get one of four certifications, each more stringent than the last: Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Likewise, students in Applied Sustainability could choose how deep they wanted to go in the course:

Green: read the articles, watch the videos and take the quizzes

Silver: take quizzes and participate in online discussion

Gold: take quizzes and complete a hands-on task (e.g. a garbage audit)

Platinum: take quizzes and complete a larger-scale project that spans the length of the course (e.g. a sustainable design in Google SketchUp)

Having four different levels of difficulty allowed students to tailor their educational experience to the amount of time they were willing to commit, and encouraged them to stick with the course. “If it’s all easy, it’s no good,” Wilson says. “You want some challenge. But some people want it easy too.” The strategy seems to have paid off. At Coursera, one of the leaders in the MOOC space, the average completion rate for a course hovers around 7.5 per cent. But for Fanshawe’s first foray into massive online learning, a full 17.5 per cent of students stuck with the course through completion, with about a third of them working on one of the higher LEED levels (14 completed a platinum project).

Wilson developed the course on the college’s longtime learning management system, from Desire2Learn, which recently added a platform for open courses (Fanshawe was the first client to run a MOOC on the system). Getting the game elements to work required some tweaking by a staff technologist as well as some consultation with Desire2Learn. In July, Fanshawe received a Desire2EXCEL Innovation Award for integrating gamification into a MOOC.

Given its success the first time around, Applied Sustainability’s return is pretty much a sure bet, perhaps as soon as this fall. Wilson is considering adding badges for the next round for students who complete more than one level. She’s also hoping to integrate Reddit-style up-voting and down-voting in the discussion forums, which should help improve the signal-to-noise ratio and allow her to recognize the highest-scoring contributors with badges. Still, don’t expect a leaderboard for the top-performing students or “mayors” of different areas of the course any time soon. The game design here is in service of the main objective—teaching sustainability—and not the other way around.