Texas Tech University: History of Higher Education in the United States - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 213

discussed Lee Sheldon s ideas about using gaming techniques in the college

classroom. I both teach a class on

'

and am always exper-
imenting with my own teaching. I was intrigued, so I wrote to Mr. Sheldon to
ask him about his class. He sent me his syllabus, I read it, and then began
thinking about my own teaching and classes.

“ College Teaching �

I began talking about Mr. Sheldon class. My

students were also intrigued with his ideas, and so I started to experiment in an
online class about the history of higher education that I was teaching the
following semester. I created various levels that my students could achieve over
the semester and a menu of assignments students could choose from, rather
than a set of assignments they must complete. I also gave students choices in
how they could earn participation points. The result was positive, and so that
summer I decided in the fall that I would redesign my face-to-face class on the
history of higher education. To do so, I turned to Jason, Jason

' s ideas in my “ College Teaching �

s gaming friends,
and my brother-in-law, who is also a gamer. Their collective advice, Lee
Sheldon

'

' s ideas about using leveling, and lots of creativity helped me create

the “ History of Higher Education in the United States, � a class that I will detail

below.

To begin, I thought about the idea of the class being a big game with a series of
little games within the big one. The big game of the class is divided into four
distinct sections. I labeled the sections on my syllabus as the “ Freshman,

�

Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years. Each year has a new set of rules as to

how to earn points and several classes within it. Each class

represents a little game, which I labeled as a quest . Each quest has its own name
based on the topic of the class. Because this is a graduate student course, each
class meets once a week for three hours.

“ achievements �

The freshman year units concentrated on introductory material to the class and
contained four classes: an introduction to the course and the syllabus, two
classes that overviewed the history of higher education, and a class that
introduced doing archival research. After the freshman year, we looked at
higher education history era by era and as we moved through the various years,
like the college experience, both the history and the class became cognitively
more complex. The sophomore year we covered higher education history in the
Colonial era, the Antebellum era, the lead into and the Progressive era, and a