Students experiencing academic difficulties are often encouraged or required to complete courses to improve their learning skills. In this episode, Andrew Buchmann, David Runge, and Sean Milligan join us to discuss how gamification is transforming one such course for students on academic probation. Andrew, David, and Sean are Academic Success Advisors at SUNY-Oswego.
Show Notes
Transcript
John: Students experiencing academic difficulties are often encouraged or required to complete courses to improve their learning skills. In this episode, we explore how gamification is transforming one such course for students on academic probation.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guests today are Andrew Buchmann, David Runge, and Sean Milligan. Andrew, David, and Sean are Academic Success Advisors here at SUNY-Oswego. They are working on a revision of a one-credit course for students on academic probation that incorporates elements of Dungeons and Dragons. Welcome, Andrew, David, and Sean,
Andrew: Thank you for having us here.
Sean: Thank you.
John: Our teas today are:… Andrew, are you drinking tea?
Andrew: I am drinking a green tea. A pretty basic quality green tea.
John: …and David?
David: I do. I almost forgot, but I have a very nice ginger peach with fruity notes from Teavana.
John: Very nice. And Sean?
Sean: Yes, just a pretty classic Earl Gray, nothing too fancy.
John: And Rebecca?
Rebecca: I took a picture of it, John, because I have a new one today. I have Brodies famous Edinburgh tea.
John: As opposed to the Brodies Scottish tea.
Rebecca: Yeah, usually it’s a Scottish afternoon or a breakfast tea, but I got really daring and tried a different one. I’m not sure it tastes that much different.
John: And I have English breakfast tea, just the plain English breakfast tea, nothing fancy,
Rebecca: Not famous Edinburgh tea.
John: No, this is just Twinings. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your plan to add Dungeons and Dragons elements to your academic success course. First, though, could you give us a little background on this course? What does it generally cover, and how often does it mean, et cetera.
Andrew: So I can only really speak to where the class was as of fall 2019 because that’s when the Advisement Center took over teaching the course. And in that semester is when we did our first redesign of the course, and it wasn’t so much as a complete overhaul of everything, but just really trying to burrow down on what topics we wanted to discuss to get the most out of this eight-week long course. So the class itself really centers on academic success strategies, things like growth mindset, time management, effective learning strategies, things like that, and goal setting as well. And the idea is to help students who are on academic probation, or even those who aren’t on academic probation, maybe get some more skills in terms of academic success to help them be better in their other classes.
John: And you mentioned this class meets for eight weeks. How many hours per week does it meet?
Andrew: This is typically an hour-long class. Sometimes it varies, depending on if it’s a Monday, Wednesday or a Tuesday, Thursday section, and where it fits. But we’re looking at about an hour per class meeting.
David: We also have offered, in past couple semesters, at least a couple of asynchronous sections as well, to try to support those students who may not be otherwise able to fit the class section into their schedule.
Rebecca: So you mentioned the course is eight weeks. So is this a quarter course, meaning, like in the first half of the semester, or is it one that meets the second half of the semester?
Andrew: Typically, we’ll have more sections in the first half. So yes, quarter class, but in the both fall and spring semester, we will have a quarter two and a quarter four section, typically an asynchronous online section to capture any students who might have missed it in that first half.
John: What motivated the redesign of this course?
Sean: So I think a couple of different things motivated the redesign of the course. First and foremost, probably, we’re all pretty big nerds… I think we would admit to… and so we love video games, tabletop gaming, it’s a big part of our lives. And so like any teacher, I think we’re always looking for ways to sort of inject our own interest into our course as much as we can. But aside from the personal aspect, we each have a supplemental role as advisors here at SUNY Oswego. David, for example, is kind of our transfer expert and also supervises our student advisement guides. Andrew is our Starfish coordinator, which is our sort of advising platform that we use and rely on heavily. One of my supplemental roles that I’ve taken on recently is to try to increase the scholarly activity and the scholarly output of the advisement center. So as a happy coincidence, once I took on that role of trying to increase our scholarly output, I saw a call for papers for a Board Game Academics Conference and Journal. So at the same time, we’ve been noticing struggles with our students in Edu 104: a lack of engagement, poor grades, students coming in very, very late, unprepared… and really, this is not a course that should be difficult. It’s designed to help them be successful. And so seeing such high numbers of students failing, having very high absenteeism showed us that we definitely have room for improvement. So we devised this redesign to simultaneously tackle these issues that we’ve been observing in our classes. And we also did submit a proposal to that Board Game Academics Conference, which we presented at in July in Morristown, New Jersey, and we should be appearing in their online journal issue this February. So a couple of different factors going on at once. So our personal interest, putting some work out there in the board game academics journal, and really the most important thing, just trying to help our students and get them more engaged.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how elements of Dungeons and Dragons will be incorporated into the course?
David: Yeah, definitely. So it’s important to note that when we first had a chat about this, we’re trying to figure out, how can we further engage students. And we thought about the concept of gamifying, making it exciting, fun. We looked at a couple of different games. We sat down together. First we thought, well, can we do a board game? Could we modify something like the game of life, the game of college life, in some way, with pit stops along the way? Could we do some other type of system or design? But one of the reasons we settled on Dungeons and Dragons, first of all was that we had a really big interest in it, but it’s also a very immersive experience. Someone who’s playing a proper Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game lives out that character, they have those experiences. So we were hoping by tying together course learning elements with a game of Dungeons and Dragons, we could implement what they’re learning into the actual gameplay experience. So what we’ve done, and we’ve started through our pilot this fall already, so the class is ongoing right now, we basically break the class down so that once a week, Sean, who is a primary instructor for the course, is teaching about whether it’s the learning strategy, engaging with offices on campus, how mindset plays into academics, and then the other day of the week, we’ll actually play a game of Dungeons and Dragons with our students, hoping to replicate or incorporate something related to that lesson into the class material. So for example, previous week, Sean had talked about mindsets and also how you approach things like failure or successes. So in that week, we actually had them in what is considered a combat scenario in Dungeons and Dragons, where their characters were fighting monsters, and as the game went on, we had them face tougher and tougher monsters to indicate that sometimes you might fail. But then how do you return and pick yourself back up? How do you adapt in those moments? Do you rely on your teammates, the fellow players, or do you try to go it alone? And how does that impact your outcome? Beyond just the two sessions, the learning each week and the playing each week, we also infused D & D themed items even into the course syllabus. So some of the language built into there, instead of saying you have this assignment, Sean used the language “You have this quest to complete.” We identified that you have a main quest, the required elements of the course, and then a side quest, kind of pick your own adventure in order to allow you to earn points through the course. And then he also offered some incentives to timely work completion or meeting extra tasks by offering feats and perks into the class as well, where they might be able to ask the instructor for extra help or extra time on an assignment if they did something in a certain way. So infusing it both into the actual what’s happening in the class, but even into just a structure and foundational design of the course, all meant to hopefully make it more engaging and exciting.
John: Do most students come into the course having some background and experience with Dungeons and Dragons, or is this something new to them?
David: So what we’ve seen so far, and those shared personally, most didn’t have a lot of experience. There was one student who came in with a lot of experience who was very gung ho and excited, and it’s really been awesome to have that student there, because they’re actually taking the lead in the class and then helping to encourage their peers, others who have never heard of it once in their life, and they’re learning it for the first time. So that also impacted a little bit of the course design in terms of how we structure the lessons, how we’re talking to them during the D & D sessions. We know we’re not playing with experienced players, but rather, we’re having to walk them through things as true novices as well. And actually, we’re lucky to have Andrew with us, because he’s never even played a game of D & D, so he offered a lot of great feedback for us, where I’m maybe the most experienced player in the group, and even my experience is fairly limited, truth be told, but he had really great feedback in terms of some of the language we were using in the design saying, “Hey, this wouldn’t really connect with someone who has never played before.” So he offered good feedback there too,
Andrew: Just to jump on to that point too, as someone who’s not played D & D, I’m very excited for this because it’s always been something that I’ve wanted to do, and a campaign has just never fired in my personal life. So here I have this opportunity to be a part of a campaign that’s also in alignment with the work that I do on a day-to-day basis. So I’m very excited to see where this ultimately goes. And so far, the sign is that it’s pointing in a good direction for us.
Rebecca: So how have students responded, especially those who are really unfamiliar with Dungeons and Dragons. I’m really curious what the response was on day one.
Sean: So I think the response on day one was a little bit of hesitation, which is to be expected, and we were ready for that. Students who weren’t quite sure what to make of it, how it would really be impacting their course experience. But over the last couple of weeks, when we’ve been playing more, we’ve been getting into more interesting scenarios, like we’ve been having combat scenarios with goblins and other monsters, the students have really gotten into it. David mentioned failure earlier as a class concept, teaching students that failure is a fact of life and we’re going to fail at some point. We all fail in different ways, big and small. But it doesn’t have to be the end of the road. It doesn’t have to be a barrier. If you have a growth mindset, you can view that failure as a learning experience. We had this one student who has never played D & D before playing, and she kept rolling a one when she went to attack this goblin. Now, if you’re not familiar with D & D, if you roll a one, it’s called a critical miss, and it’s very bad. You completely miss your opponent to the point where you might even end up hurting yourself or inadvertently causing some other chaos to occur. And she kept rolling a one, so having these instances of failure, but we turn that back into a learning experience of, “Hey, this is like what we talked about in Tuesday. Okay, even though you rolled a one, it’s not the end of the fight, and you can come back next turn and try to improve and do better.” And so the students have been laughing. They’ve been problem solving as a group. So I would say, hesitant at first, but definitely seeing signs of improvement there.
David: And I think that’s one of the important things, that with the game, it’s not just playing the game. We’re trying in every moment to tie it back to a lesson or their experience as a student. So when that student repeatedly had those failures, we paused the game for a second, stepped out of the game and said, “You know, sometimes you’re gonna have those weeks where things are going wrong, where you’re struggling in class, maybe in the residence halls, things aren’t going well, but then you can always keep in mind that there’s another turn coming up next, another class, another week, and how you respond to that is really important.” And in the case of that student, what was exciting was a turn or two later, she actually succeeded in defeating that goblin, and was really excited. It wasn’t just I rolled and I did it, but the sense of joy and just the excitement there, which was really kind of cool. The other thing that was important for us in setting up this course, as well, as we mentioned, a lot of students don’t have experience with this. Even when we were signing up for the class, we made sure to tell them right up front, this is going to be a gamified section. We’re going to be playing dungeons and dragons. We gave them the opportunity that if they had to take this, there was that other section of EDU 104, our quarter two course. So if they wanted to go into that, they could instead, if this seemed like something that they weren’t willing to participate in, because we want everyone to voluntarily try this new experience with us really being forced into it, especially since for some students, EDU 104 might actually be a condition of their successful academic probation. So we didn’t want to negatively impact anyone in any way.
John: Now, one of the things I was thinking as you’ve been talking about this is that students have, even if they’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons before, they do have experience of working through games, getting setbacks, learning from those and moving forward and having that opportunity to make that connection explicit between that and their experience in college, I would think could be a really effective type of connection that students might not otherwise make, because many other students on academic probation don’t come in necessarily with that growth mindset towards academics.
David: Yeah, definitely. I mean trying to find ways to encourage them, to excite them, to see sometimes things work, sometimes things don’t, but hopefully, again, the purpose being, if we’re teaching something in class, we want to form that connection, and the gameplay is the secondary nature. Hopefully it’s fun and engaging, exciting for them, but more than anything, it serves as a reinforcement that what they do in the class and the game is going to help them in all of the other courses as well. Again, an example from a recent play session. The other day, we had them solving puzzles where they were going through a haunted forest and they needed to solve different riddles and puzzles and whatnot. And our main play table, because one of the ways the class is designed, we have a playing table, and then observers, like a fishbowl style, and the observer is, to make sure that they’re not disengaged during the class, are writing reflective notes. What are they observing? What are they experiencing? We actually, for that class, allowed the observers to participate as well. So we gave copies of the puzzle to them too, so they could play. And we noticed a really interesting effect during that. The people who were the live players were struggling a little more to solve the puzzle, and the observers solved it more quickly. So we first gave them the opportunity, within the theme of the game, to say, would the players like to commune with the spirits of the forest, the people around them, to maybe get them hints or clues so they’re able to use their classmates to help them through those struggles. But then Sean tied it back to well, why was it that we think maybe those observers solved this quicker, right? It’s not for a lack of any intellectual ability. They’re all working really hard. They’re using teamwork. But maybe it was the stakes in that moment, the stresses that they were the ones who the focus was on, they felt more time pressures. They felt more confined to the bounds of the game, where the others in a more relaxed setting, were able to solve that and process that. So trying to draw together, “Well, how might that relate to your education, in studying versus test taking?” And hopefully that’s helping them to see those connections and then remember that when they go into their courses as well.
Rebecca: I know some of the motivations you had indicated at the start of this conversation for exploring some different options for this class, included student motivation, absenteeism, etc, and it’s still a bit early in the semester, end of week four, I think that’s where we are. How is it looking for students, are they attending? Are they staying motivated? Are they staying engaged so far?
Sean: So far, yes. Our results are very promising. I was actually just doing some quick calculations, and the last time I taught this course was a non-gamified version in spring of 2024, for the first four weeks, I had an average of 24% of my class absent on any given day, nearly a quarter of the class absent, which is a very high number. Currently, through the first four weeks with this gamified version, we’re seeing only 9% absenteeism. So that, to me, is a really promising sign that they’re more engaged, that they’re coming to class. Another interesting effect that I’ve noticed… we all know as teachers that students can be unprepared sometimes, they can show up to class without the most basic of writing utensils, paper notetaking supplies. One thing I have not reminded them a single time to bring their dice for our gameplay sessions, and yet they have always had the dice, not a single time has a student forgotten their dice. I think that, to me, is a really cool example of how the gamification is not only encouraging the students to show up and be present, but to be prepared for class and prepared for gameplay. And of course, we’ll be learning through the gameplay, so they are prepared for class and they’re bringing the appropriate materials.
John: Do you think that’s because it’s forming more connections across the students, they’re getting to know each other better, they’re seeing themselves as part of a team, which might also help lead to more success later, if students feel more connected to other students, and perhaps more generally, the institution.
Andrew: I can say, as an observer of this… so Sean is teaching the class right now, and because David has a lot of experience in the Dungeons and Dragons game itself, has been DMing for us, I’ve gotten to sit back and watch, and I’m seeing students who, in my typical section of EDU 104, who want to engage with one another. They are having conversations in the gameplay back and forth between what’s happening in the game, how to help one another. “Hey, you should do this because of your abilities. They would help us in this situation.” So even amongst themselves, the peers in the classroom are engaging with each other in ways that I don’t think I’ve ever seen them engage in a typical EDU 104 class. So I think the signs are pointing in a good direction for that for us, that maybe that’s a part of it, is they’re able to develop a more solid relationship with their peers, because in order to advance through the game, you have to work together. You have to communicate with each other, you have to rely on each other’s strengths to make up for your own weaknesses.
Rebecca: And some of my experiences of teaching gamified courses in the past, one of the things that I have observed is that students quickly discover that learning is not just about themselves, but they feel a sense of responsibility towards each other, and that they quickly learn or discover that they have to show up for each other and that they are responsible for each other, and they’re responsible for the learning of each other. And in some ways, it seems like gamifying this particular course is a really great opportunity to demonstrate this particular skill set.
Andrew: I think of a perfect example of this in the most recent game session where one of the students chose to do a maybe less effective move for themselves and their character, but knowing that, by using this move, it was going to make the enemy prone, and therefore allow his teammates, who could then use their strengths to tackle that particular issue or overcome that particular opponent.
John: This reminds me of a conversation I had a number of years ago with Bill Goffe, a former colleague who’s now at Penn State. He had introduced team-based learning into a class that had some issues with attendance before. And he said when students were working with teams and they were depending on each other, if one of them didn’t show up, there was positive peer pressure on them the next time saying, “Hey, we needed you. You weren’t there for us,” and it was a really remarkable transition.
David: Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely seeing, whether it’s in the game players in the class, generally, the students are relying on each other, and some of that is within the game, but sometimes it’s understanding the rules of the game. And you can see those who have picked up the game mechanics more quickly, because it’s a very hefty game, are helping the other ones going through that, and it’s not just, Hey, you’re on your own. You’re figuring this all by yourself, but we’re going to collaboratively do this, because your success is my success, and down the road, maybe in a later turn, you might save my character, where I might save yours as well. But it’s really cool to see them interact in the context of the game and how they’re learning and processing all this.
Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see if those relationships carry out beyond the bounds of the classroom.
John: So are you still able to cover the same learning objectives you were before, but through this game mechanic?
Sean: Yes, we are, absolutely. And so that’s the purpose of dividing our assignments, or our quests, as we’ve rethemed them. We’ve divided them between main quests and side quests. So main quests are mandatory, being able to pick mandatory assignments the students must do allows us to ensure that the learning objectives are still going to be met. And the side quest gives students an opportunity to still meet the learning objectives, but showcase their learning in a way that they’re more comfortable with. So if one student is more comfortable picking the presentation sidequest, they can do that, but if another student is less comfortable with presentations and would rather showcase the same learning through a traditional paper, a poster project, or something of that nature, we allow them to do that. So that gives the students some agency over their own learning, which I think is a really powerful thing. So we’ve kind of designed the main quest and the side quest to make sure they’re still hitting the same objectives, but just giving the students options.
David: And to that as well, it’s really forced us, I think, as instructors, again, Sean being the primary one, but we’ve been consulting, myself and Andrew. It’s forced us to really distill down what are the most relevant, important, must know pieces of this class as well, because we’re functionally going from having this quarter chorus with two true instructional days to having half of those instructional and having half of an experiential day as well, where hopefully they’re gonna let them practice that. So we had that conversation at the beginning of the semester and said, “Are there lessons that we would have usually done that maybe aren’t quite as not, I wouldn’t say important, but for the purpose of success and growth and helping them to learn?” We might pull back up, or maybe we’ll add it into our Brightspace course, and we’ll have that be a supplemental reading or an add on reading beyond the class as well, to continue the learning.
Andrew: And I’ll just add to it, the onset of this when we were going through the redesign process of the curriculum for EDU 104, we put an emphasis on not changing what the course content was, if anything, it was just as David mentioned, refining it to make sure that we were allocating enough time for the experiential component of it. But our cornerstone of the class was, we are not doing this just to play D & D, although that would be great, and I’m sure some of the students would love to do that. There’s a purpose for this class, for students who are on academic probation, not only is it a requirement that they must complete it, but we really want them to take those learning objectives and then apply them to their other courses. Really, from the beginning of this project, we have focused on making sure that those learning outcomes stay true, whether or not this course is being taught through a D & D style gameplay or in its traditional sense, which we will be doing next semester. We are going to have both the D & D version of this, the traditional version of EDU 104 as well as the asynchronous online sections to make sure that no matter what the student’s preferences are and our options for modality, that we’re still meeting those learning objectives.
Rebecca: So you’ve really modeled a great opportunity for this particular kind of class, students on probation, where motivation is really key to stay engaged in a really important base. But are there other opportunities where a game-based strategy would be really effective?
Sean: Yes, absolutely. I think game-based learning can be really effective in a variety of classes across the disciplines. So when we were at the board game academics conference in July, I want to give this person credit, Dr. Archie Fields at the University of Calgary is a philosophy professor, and he also uses Dungeons and Dragons in his philosophy courses. One of the really cool examples he gave of how he can teach philosophy to students through gameplay is the example of the trolley problem. Many of your listeners, I’m sure, are familiar with the trolley problem, this famous thought experiment that I’m probably going to butcher this, but there’s a train coming down the tracks, and it’s currently on track to, unfortunately, hit, say, five people, but you have the option to flick a switch, redirect the train where it’s only going to hit one person. And so it’s this ethical and moral question of, would you intervene to save five people, but then you’re choosing to redirect the train or the trolley towards one person, and Dr. Fields restructured this as the dragon problem in Dungeons and Dragons, and actually has the students play out this moral quandary, which I think is really fascinating. And this got me thinking just about other classes and other fields that could use Dungeons and Dragons or other role playing games. If you’re in a zoology or biology class, you could be in an environment seeing animals and different species of wildlife in the game world, and observing their behaviors. We can think of so many examples. But I think it’s definitely something that’s transferable to other types of classes as well.
Andrew: Anything where the experiential component, for logistical reasons, financial reasons, whatever it might be, where you can dive into this world through the theater of the mind, and maybe some extra equipment that you might have on your hands too, to be able to provide some more visual details for this. But really it gives you an opportunity through that theater of mind to experience things that otherwise you wouldn’t get to in a traditional classroom setting, because you’re just learning about maybe the theory or doing some rote work based on whatever that concept is, but through something like Dungeons and Dragons, you have the opportunity to experience these things, if only in your mind, but still experience them. And then it gives students the opportunity to reflect on, “Well, how did it go? What were the benefits of doing it? What didn’t you like about doing it?” versus if you’re only ever dealing in theory, you might never get to apply those concepts.
David: One of the cool things we’re practicing this in a higher education setting. But there actually is a fairly rich history of this being put into the K through 12 setting as well. Wizards of the Coast, which is the parent of Dungeons and Dragons, they actually have a D & D beyond educators toolkit, and they offer an educators’ license where you can get some of the materials. Mention this you’re a teacher, and pick up some of those things for free, some of the resources, and then they have actually, akin to lesson plans, basically scenarios, pre-planned modules that you can then work with students in different grades as well. So the opportunity for that immersive, experiential, not just in theory, but trying it yourself, type of gameplay and learning, is there. And I think what we’re trying to do is bring it into our course in areas we’ve seen it be successful already.
Andrew: And what we’ve noticed, too, in our research is that there’s a lack of scholarship work with tabletop gaming and role playing, gaming used in classrooms at the college level, great expansive work in K through 12, but not as much in higher ed. So if there’s opportunities out there, this is definitely a place where scholarship can definitely come from.
John: Are you going to do anything differently next time, or does it seem to be working pretty well as it’s currently structured?
David: Some of it is the work in progress that we’re actively learning along the way. But again, as an example here, I was just talking with Andrew this morning about our observation that sometimes those observers in the classroom, we bounce back and forth between how engaged they are. So we tried having them use puzzles, doing reflective things, but I’ve been looking through ways that we can more greatly incorporate them, actually trying to draw some inspiration from AI as well, which I know is one of the big things we’re talking about in education now, and found some ideas to potentially have the observers, the non players maybe voice the roles of NPCs non-player characters so they can be directly involved. Maybe they do some of the dice rolling. Maybe they are assistants to the DM, the Dungeon Master, the one running the game as well. So that we’re not only having a collective group of four or five students in any given day be the main participants, but as much as possible, we can integrate everyone into each gameplay experience as well, because we saw how much more invested they were, how much more excited they were, rather than running the risk of distractions on the phone or other coursework, but we can be fully immersed in our class in that moment.
Andrew: We’re also still trying to work through the scaling problem of this, because right now, I think with the current EDU 104 section, I think 11 students are enrolled in the class right now, but that’s a manageable number, especially with our play versus the fishbowl groups. But I taught a 30-person section of EDU 104. I don’t know how I’m gonna make that work right now. That’s something we’ve got a lot of work to do to figure out how that would be incorporated in a larger classroom. Would we be doing more sessions with different groups? Would we have maybe a student take that role of Dungeon Master if they feel comfortable enough? So lots of ideas that we’re kind of spitballing to see what might work better as we scale this to a larger section.
David: That was a good point, where a typical D & D session, you’d have four to six players with one DM, the Dungeon Master, leading it. So if you have a much larger class, it can be really difficult. If I remember correctly from our conversation at that board game academic conference. The example we saw actually had the students running it as DMs in kind of smaller groups too, there. One of the unique challenges of EDU 104 is that it is a quarter course. It only has so many contact hours, so unless you have people coming in who are really familiar with the content already, you’d be trying to balance running the game while learning the game at the same time, which is why we decided to be the DMs for this time, because we already knew the rules.
Rebecca: Well, it sounds like a really interesting experiment. Thanks for sharing it with us, but we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
David: So we still have a few weeks left in the course here, after which we’re going to dive through some of the information we get back, both on continued attendance and engagement in the course as well, and we’re preparing to then submit that paper based on some of our findings. Longer term, hoping to again replicate this for spring semester, and looking at how we’re going to adapt it. Do we look at trying to implement this into an online section of the course? There is a very rich history of text-based role playing games, online role playing games, but how do you then still incorporate the experience from student to student and make it effective so it’s not just a game, but still has that learning element as well. So that’s one of the challenges at least I know I’m working on, because I would likely be the instructor for the online section.
Sean: I’m just really appreciative of being invited on.
John: Thank you. This has been really fascinating, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what you find at the end of the term.
Andrew: Thank you for having us, John and Rebecca.
David: Thank you very much.
Sean: Thank you.
Rebecca: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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