University of Arizona South: Teaching with Technology - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 88

modules help students to generalize knowledge beyond situated meanings and
ensure that learners are supported along the path to mastery, even if the goal at
the end of that path changes during the semester.

Practical Challenges and Solutions
Our enrollment

for the initial GAME-based semester of “ Teaching with

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Technology was small, numbering only six students. This allowed us to

spend time evaluating the reaction of individual students to the course format.
Ours was a diverse group: students from the humanities and the hard sciences;
from the United States and China; students who had gone right from college to
graduate school; and others who were on their second and third careers. Some
students were taking the class as credit toward a UA Certificate in College
Teaching.

There was no guarantee that our students would have prior experience with
video games or RPGs, or even a liking for games in general. To make things even
more interesting, we did not publicize the course format until the first day of
class. In general, students were receptive and even eager to engage with this new
challenge. While they lacked experience with games, many of our students were
actively interested in learning and teaching theories and could understand the
rationale for the course design in those terms.

The LMS provided our first major challenge. Designed to present content
sequentially, it was ill-suited to a course structure in which modules and
assignments were listed hierarchically in four subject areas. Students had trouble
finding the modules and assignments they were interested in. We were able to
address this issue by providing an alternate content overview, in the form of a
visual course map, as shown in Figure CH2.3 This course map has since been
improved to let students access assignments directly, allowing them to circum-
vent the traditional LMS view if they want.

Other issues were more fundamental to the design of the course. Two weeks into
the first semester with GAME, one student asked how the ability to choose from
so many assignments might affect class discussions. ( “ How will we have

anything in common to talk about? ) This proved not to be a problem for

our course, both because strong thematic connections existed between the
superficially disparate content modules, and frankly, because Dr. Brent

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