“Don’t you think it’s unprofessional to share a photo of your cat with your online students? I wouldn’t start a face-to-face class meeting with a slideshow of personal photos, so why should I do that online?”

I was caught somewhat off guard by this question during a recent faculty-development workshop that focused on building a sense of community in online courses. As part of a larger presentation and training session, I showed examples of videos and narrated slideshows that instructors had created to introduce themselves to their online students. While all of the presentations included information about the instructors’ professional backgrounds, there were also slides that showed them cuddling with beloved pets, building sandcastles with their children, or posing in front of monuments in exotic locales.

I’d always thought that sharing a bit of your personal interests and life outside of academia was a great way to find common ground and build rapport with students. Apparently, not everyone agrees. One workshop attendee went so far as to state that sharing personal details such as pet photos or baby pictures could call into question the credibility of an entire department or the university as a whole.

While I think some of the concerns raised during the workshop were taken to extremes because extremes are more fun to debate, the core questions were still valid. At the time, I was hard-pressed to come up with a response for the instructor who asked why we should begin an online course with a slideshow of personal details that we wouldn’t require students to sit through during our first meeting in a traditional course.  

Over the next few days, I thought about my relationships with my favorite professors from undergrad and grad school. When I thought about the experiences that brought us closer, I realized how many of them took place outside of a face-to-face class meeting. I remembered running into a professor at a coffee shop, hearing about her latest freelance project, and getting a bit of unexpected career advice that I’ve never forgotten. I remembered a study abroad adventure where I bonded with a French professor over our shared passion for architecture. These are the types of experiences that can be impossible to recreate with online students if we don’t take the initiative. If we don’t open the door to interaction that goes beyond revision notes and exam reminders, students won’t know they’re more to us than just submissions in a dropbox waiting to be graded. And if we don’t take the first step toward building an inviting, supportive online community, we can’t blame the technology when our courses feel cold and impersonal.

A few weeks after our workshop on community building, I met again with the same group of faculty for one of our final workshops. This time, we started our meeting with a discussion panel that featured three students who had taken online courses at DePaul. At one point during the discussion, I asked the students (in the most neutral way I could think of) how they felt about faculty sharing personal photos and information about their lives outside of work. Two of the students said they loved learning more about their professors and that this type of sharing helped foster a sense of connection. The third student said he found it mildly annoying, but didn’t feel it had a negative impact on the credibility of the instructor or the course. It wasn’t exactly journal-worthy proof of the merits of over-sharing, but I felt vindicated nevertheless.

Of course, we should avoid sharing information so deeply personal it could give students nightmares or cause them to file a lawsuit for emotional distress. And I will be the first to admit that sharing travel photos will be more meaningful if you’re teaching a course on global business and you explain what your trips to Saudi Arabia have taught you about cultural differences between American and Middle Eastern corporations. Similarly, sharing stories about your toddler’s penchant for asking surprising philosophical questions might be more beneficial in a course on child development. Yet, even sharing a video of your beloved Fluffy trying to remove her head from an empty tissue box—despite its complete irrelevance to the subject of your course and its potential to ruin your reputation as a serious educator—might have an upside. When done properly, oversharing tells students that your course is about more than just readings and thesis statements and online debates. It tells them that you care about connection and humanity and all the things that make great learning experiences more than just an exchange of money for information.

I can completely understand why faculty are eager to establish clear professional boundaries when teaching online. When every interaction is recorded, trying to connect with students in ways that feel authentic and spontaneous can be stressful. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say (on this very public and semipermanent blog) that most online students would prefer that we take these risks and provide opportunities for the type of informal bonding that often occurs more effortlessly face-to-face. If that means we occasionally miss the mark and bore them with photos of our stamp collections or a story about Fluffy’s last trip to the vet, then so be it. After all, when we ask students what they love about their favorite teachers, how often does “professionalism” or “never shared cat photos” top the list?

As an instructor in an online or hybrid course, I want to know how the students feel about the content as well as the structure of the course. I have given a number of surveys for both my hybrid and online courses that include both an initial survey and an end of quarter survey. While the university has an official assessment instrument for the evaluation of instruction, I find an informal, anonymous survey in my courses has helped me fine-tune the course for the next time it is offered. In this survey, I not only ask about the content matter, but also about the format and structure of the course. I ‘bribe’ the students to take the surveys by giving participation points or extra credit for completion.

Attitude and Demographics

As a matter of course, I ask a few questions at the beginning of the quarter to gather some demographic information as well as some attitudinal questions. I repeat the attitudinal questions at the end of the quarter to see if there have been fundamental shifts in the mindset. Here are some example results from a large lecture Mathematics class that was conducted as a hybrid (semester results)

(Click for a larger version.)

Course Content

At the end of the course, I ask a number of questions relating specifically to the course content as well as the layout and structure of the course. Course content is, of course, specific to the material being taught, but I also ask questions directly related to the layout and structure of the online materials. Here are some sample question with results from the same hybrid course (with a few content specific questions).

Free response questions

In addition to the standard survey questions, I ask students several open-ended questions that, for me, provide the greatest insight to their feelings about the course. Knowing that the results are anonymous allows the students to open up, and I have found that they really don’t hold back. Here are a few sample open-ended questions with a few student responses:

What do you think was the biggest factor in your success or failure in this course? Your response is anonymous

“being able to watch the videos over and over…but there sometimes needed to be more videos with more examples not just one because sometimes everything wasnt worded the same as how its written in the book”

“I tended to put all of my homework off until the night before class.”

Please add any information that you think will me improve this course for the next semester. Your response is anonymous

“ALL ONLINE. Teach the students how to use the online site before you start giving them assaignments on it. I was really confused in the beginning because no one said how to use the website, but now i understand it. “

“no global warming assignments, there are bigger issues to worry about no body pas [sic] attention to global warming anyway. make this class easier, this type of math isnt important for some majors, it just creates stress and wastes students time. as long as people can do basic adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing they will be good to go in life.”

ED NOTE – this is common

Conclusion

I have found these surveys to be an invaluable tool in reworking my course for the next time it is offered. I generally do not share data with anyone else, but I believe it provides a valuable insight to where any potential trouble spots are. If you wish to add a pre-post survey to your course, your instructional designer can assist in putting an anonymous survey in place.

A dozen years ago when I completed all the required courses and prelim exams for a doctorate, my dissertation chair, Dr. Jerry Summers, said to me, “Congratulations, Sharon! You are now on your own!”

He was alerting me that on the dissertation journey, no one else would be holding the reins for me.

Frightened by the notion of being on my own and the rumor that only 20 percent of the ABDs who left their program end up finishing their dissertation, I declined a few “outside” job offers and took a position within my alma mater. Since there wouldn’t be any reminders from my dissertation committee, I rallied up what I called a “butt-kicker committee” to check on my progress on a regular basis. It includes a mentor who ran after me every Wednesday for more chapters, a boyfriend who threatened to break up if I didn’t finish, and my parents who pressured me by cooking super nutritious meals.  

Today, when I think of that process “metacognitively,” I see that the fear of being “on my own” that triggered me to do something about it was an essential reinforcement for me to complete my degree. The danger of being on one’s own is immense—it can make a disciplined person procrastinate and a procrastinator drop off. When work and life keep presenting mini deadlines day in and day out, it is so easy to neglect the big, long-term deadline you’ve set for yourself—like getting a course ready for online delivery.

Like writing a dissertation, this “on-my-own” syndrome has been a major road block for online-course development. When a professor’s day is constantly filled up with teaching, meetings, and researching activities, that deadline for putting together a carefully designed course will likely be pushed, rushed, or expunged.

To beat the odds, a professor from DePaul’s College of Education came up with the idea of opening his course development schedule and experience to the world. On January 5, Dr. Chris Worthman published a blog post on the Center for Educational Technology’s website called . Developing a Hybrid Course: In the Beginning…. In his blog, Chris announced that he will post a weekly update on the progress of developing his hybrid course. The content, in his own words, will include “what I have done, experienced, and been thinking about; what excites me, scares me, and leaves me scratching my head; and, generally, just what this means to me professionally.”

Chris’s idea of blogging his progress strikes me as such a brilliant idea—more brilliant than my butt-kicker committee (even though there were no blogs back then). I see that by turning a course-development project into a reality show, Chris sought out 1) an effective motivation strategy for himself, 2) a professional-development example for his faculty peers, and 3) a model for his students, which is the most important and cleverest aspect of it.

A Motivation-through-Visibility Strategy

As Chris mentioned in his blog, he is “in the enviable position this quarter of developing a new course for a new program that will be taught for this first time in spring 2012 as a hybrid.” Everything about this course was new—including he himself to the experience. Chris was put on a schedule by his instructional designer and initiated the blog to “hold himself to it.”

If making my dissertation visible to my mentor, boyfriend, and family helped create an audience that trigged me to contribute and deliver for their readership, Chris’s action of blogging about his course surely has pushed this “audience effect” to a much higher level. Researchers have found that motivation generated through visibility has been a driving force for the success of online systems such as Wikipedia. Knowing the existence of an audience, as they found, may be sufficient to trigger contribution on its own. So, for Dr. Worthman, having to present his progress every week makes moving his work forward an inevitable action that he now owes to his readers like me. This motivation-through-visibility strategy left him no room to fall back.

A Professional-Development Example for Faculty Peers

In his blog, Chris wrote, “This will be an exercise into the unknown for me because I am not used to spilling the details of a new experience in this way. I hope, however, that it will provide others—like you—with some insight into my professional development and invite others—like you—to share your own experiences, particularly as it relates to digital technology use.”

As the director of his school’s Center for Educational Technology and the associate dean for Curriculum and Academic Programs, Chris has the responsibility of leading faculty into the new era of teaching and learning, which is heavily influenced by the use of digital technology.  When it comes online learning, faculty may have been exposed to sample courses or bits and pieces of stories shared by online-teaching veterans, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to observe the whole process and almost never do they hear the pains and gains associated with each of step of development.

From an initial pledge of doing his work openly, to toiling with Softchalk, to a metaphorical analysis of online-course development, to juggling among elements within a course, his blog brought faculty members a real picture of what it is like for a faculty member to develop a new course in a new modality under a very tight schedule.

A Role Model for Students

I always feel that higher education—as it is now designed—seems to position its faculty and students into two very discrete groups of “knowledge providers” and “knowledge seekers,” or the ones who know and the ones who don’t.

If the process of learning was a race, the only ones who are running are the students; the professors are merely standing on the side to advise and to make some judgments. Those who belong to the professor clan never get to show the ones struggling on the track how they had approached the finish line and never get to rejoin the race—well, not until they begin to learn something new—like teaching online.

When it comes to building technology competencies, online teaching provides faculty members a unique opportunity to meet their students at the starting line. Not only does it put professors in the students’ shoes but also offers students an opportunity to observe how professors conduct the race. The latter can be achieved through a very careful design, like the one Chris Workthman is trying to accomplish. By implementing project-based learning, Chris, tried to develop an authentic learning experience for his students—by letting them experience what he is experiencing. As he said, in his January 19 blog, A Few Thoughts on Process, “To a large degree, what I am experiencing in designing my course is what I want my students to experience when they develop modules on different components of the English language arts.”

Besides teaching them the way of learning, it is even more critical for a professor to cast a spiritual influence on the students, such as the attitude that one should carry in dealing with the unknown. “I want them to jump, with no fear of failure but a level of realism that suggests they are going to have to work hard,” Chris wrote. “I want them to envision themselves as teachers doing actual teacher work. I want them to have a certain level of frustration that forces them to think at a meta-level not only about what they are doing but about teaching and learning in general.”

Lee Shulman once said, “Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate… and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange, and examine.” Yet, it takes a lot of “guts” for one to be totally open to that action of sharing, exchanging, and examining. Chris Worthman’s blog reminded me of a comment George Clooney once made on using social media: “I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands [than use social media].” Although it’s meant to be a celebrity’s act to defend his privacy, it also showed how hard it is for people to open up their thoughts. For this, Chris’s idea of sharing your course development stories is more than brilliant—it is very brave! I am looking forward to seeing his hybrid course lead, inspire, and transform his students into online learning troopers in the coming spring quarter.

(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.)

My wife and I just had the opportunity to visit Montréal over Columbus Day weekend, and it provided a nice little vacation, as well as an opportunity for me to practice my French skills. I was a little nervous at first, because although I had a French minor as an undergrad, that was twelve years ago, and I’ve had very little formal practice since. I guess that goes with speaking a language that isn’t used very much in North America, with the exception of Québec. My first attempts at speaking again were a little stumbling, as I made reservations for accommodations and tickets over the phone. I was often fishing for the right verb or term to use. However, I was really surprised at how quickly it all came back to me with only a little practice. By the second day, I was having lengthy, involved conversations with people, which I would then have to attempt to translate back to my wife. It was after having a detailed conversation about wine with a restaurant’s sommelier on Saturday night that I began to think I might not be as rusty as I’ve been telling everyone. I’d never actually talked about wine in French before, but I found myself navigating a discussion about tannins and different aromas in the wine’s nose with ease. My wife didn’t speak more than a few words of French before we went on the trip, and although she still didn’t know a lot more afterward, she speaks with a great accent.

All this was possible through the magic of language immersion. Yes, I could have brushed up on my French before the trip (and I did, a little), but this was not nearly as effective as being dropped into the streets of Montréal and knowing that we weren’t going to get directions to our next destination if I didn’t know how to ask. Being forced to practice not only what I knew how to say but also listening and responding to others in an unscripted fashion reawakened my comprehension skills. I can also say that once that switch has been flipped, it’s hard to change it back; I found myself saying “pardon” to people on the streets of Chicago instead of “excuse me” for most of the next week!

This anecdote illustrates in a concrete way the power of immersion in language learning. The fact that I could spend a weekend in Montréal and come back nearly fluent again after over a decade of very little practice shows immersion’s ability to generate near-native fluency without making the learner aware that it is happening. When you get thrown into the deep end like this, if you have the rudimentary skills necessary, most of the time you end up swimming, and swimming strongly. This was not true immersion, i.e. learning mathematics and science in French to expand my skills in math and science as well as French, but submersion; I was the foreign-language speaker with all the natives, and it was sink-or-swim. Still, it provided an opportunity to reacquire skills at a much greater rate than practicing at home.

As educators, we are constantly searching for ways to create activities and assessments in our courses that will not only challenge our students in the present but also prepare them for similar as-yet-unknown challenges in their disciplines in the future. We make them jump through hoops in our courses, believing that each hoop is getting them a little closer to our ultimate goal, that of fluency with the materials and processes at hand. However, even though we may think we are immersing our students in that world of content, we often are just giving them a boat to travel across the surface. Consider the following scenario:

A marketing professor is teaching his students about the processes involved in targeted marketing (the practice of selecting specific strategies or materials in order to best attract a particular group of individuals). His current objectives are:

1. Students will select a group to target.
2. Students will select a strategy to market a product to this specific group.
3. Students will develop a marketing campaign aimed at this specific group.

Based on these objectives, it would be very possible to create an exercise in which students select a group, use some typical strategies outlined by the textbook in reaching that market, make use of instructor-provided data and generate a marketing campaign. This could even be a project that could take a whole term, depending on how the various pieces of the exercise are presented. Sounds good, right?

Let’s take another look. I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the need for authenticity in student exercises, and this is yet another place where it’s easy to think you’re giving students a real-life, hands-on experience, when in fact you’re giving them strategies from a textbook and data from a box. Is this a good real-world exercise? Well, for the most part it is. These kinds of simulation exercises are given in many classes, and it does teach students how to process and analyze data. In many cases, this will adequately prepare students for performance in the real world, assuming that they are predominantly dealing with mostly cut-and-dry data.

However, this exercise, while it might be comprehensive, lacks the “messiness” associated with a more authentic experience. When you’re dealing with real data and real firms, things happen that you aren’t really prepared for in a “canned” exercise like I just described. Data points don’t always tell a story; sometimes they are scattered in such a way that they don’t show any relationships at all, or perhaps the data suggest a conclusion altogether different than the one students are striving to prove. Target markets change all the time, as the whims of a fickle population change. A real firm might have an enormous amount of data far in excess of what is needed or is relevant and so might require any number of weeding out processes to obtain actually usable data. Given all these possibilities, the internship model is about the truest experience out there, because it provides the opportunity to practice skills gained in class as well as to see how things actually work outside the classroom “ideal situation” bubble. However, not everyone has the time to devote to an internship in every academic program. Therefore, it is up to us as instructors to not only provide the tools to solve the problems our students will face in the real world but also to expose them as much as possible to the actual chaos that can happen within it. As much as we always try to tell our students that there are standardized procedures for everything they will face, we know that the real world doesn’t always work that way.

What does this mean for us? As we are creating assessments and exercises for our students that are supposed to be real-world simulations, we should be striving as much as possible to simulate real-world situations in their construction. Rather than giving students data from a set, show students how to obtain various data from various places and have them obtain it themselves. Have them create their own research rather than telling them what questions to ask and what data correlations to look for. In this way they can encounter the chaos they will find in the future when research and data don’t always play well together. Most importantly, giving students this more realistic experience will allow them to make mistakes. We often think that guiding students to be mistake-free will be the best learning experience, but we also know that students can learn just as much from failing and needing to come up with an alternate solution to a problem. Just because it’s real-world data doesn’t necessarily make it a real-world exercise; students need to feel like they have some ownership, and they have to be exposed to the imperfections right along with the methods.

So it’s now been a few weeks since our French immersion experience, and I can say at this point that a little refresher was just what I needed. I tried really hard to speak well, and I failed plenty during that time too. Fortunately, the locals were nice enough to correct me or suggest a different wording, but those mistakes also helped me learn even more and recall things I really shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place. My wife has been inspired to learn more French and is now doing audio lessons on her morning commute. The early immersion experience has been quite helpful to her as she navigates conversational expressions, because her ear has already been attuned to the nuances of the language; she’s getting more out of the instruction than she would if she were just presented with canned audio and conversation because she already knows how to listen to it.

Creating an immersive learning process can be tougher, messier and less predictable than just giving out textbook problems and quizzes, but real life doesn’t have a textbook, and students won’t be able to refer to a handy manual when they encounter situations they might not be prepared for. Immersion is tremendously valuable for teaching students to think on their feet and to adjust as necessary. It’s worth the extra effort on our part to help bring a little more of the outside world into the classroom, because our students will be that much better prepared to venture out into it later.

My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

As a mother, I had been used to being named the source of all faults, but this particular accusation brought me chills—I would be considered a criminal, at least by myself, if he brought up the same claim when he graduates from high school.

Ridden by guilt, I sent him back to Chinese school this fall.

On the first day of school, dropping Grant off at the first graders’ classroom was quite dramatic: all the parents and their well-behaved kids watched me struggle to break away from his clenching and screaming. But then something happened, and it made my Chinese-resenting son fall in love with learning Chinese. This something was a computer program on a CD that was given to first-grade Chinese students as a homework assignment. After learning the rhymed text in class, students were supposed to unscramble the sentences by dragging the characters to the right location. They were timed for their action and given a code to copy down to their homework booklet as proof of completion.

With his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand fiercely moving the mouse, Grant completed his weekly assignments at once and moved on to the next lesson by himself. Once in a while, he would throw his hand over his head and shake his fist, announcing with excitement “yeah, I got it in fifty seconds, Mommy” or “seriously, Mommy, I’ve got it in zero seconds before!” I know that zero-second record was a miscount because he couldn’t read the Chinese word for a minute that stood in front of zero seconds, but nevertheless, I was thrilled—not just by my son’s progress but more by witnessing live evidence of the impact of technology or, more precisely, the strategy of making learning a fun game.

When I put my instructional designer’s hat on to analyze this learning scenario, I see that this simple, computer-aided learning exercise designed by Dr. Liping Ma as part of her Chinese-language curriculum contains quite a number of gaming characteristics, even though it wasn’t branded as a game. In fact, it carries elements of all three general good-game design principles summarized by Dr. James Paul Gee (Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines):

• Empowered Learners—It was not me dragging him into a classroom; it was he himself driving the mouse and the movement of the words.
• Problem Solving—There is a challenge for Grant: he has to compete with himself to complete the task in shorter and shorter times.
• Understanding—Grant has to comprehend the rules of the game as well as the foundation of it, which is the meaning of each Chinese character (even though he didn’t realize that).

Using technology as its powerful carrier, games—in all forms and shapes—are invading our lives. They are commonly viewed by parents and educators as a threat—an evil monster made with some additive ingredients that competes with us for our children’s, our students’, and even our own attention and making it hard for all of us to focus on the right things, such as learning. In dealing with this “threat,” we have tried to shut it out (can you guess how many places I have tried to hide my son’s Nintendo DS?); we have used it to incentivize (“If you finish your homework, you get to play Nintendo for twenty minutes”); and in some rare cases, we have used it as a tool to teach (such as downloading a math or a spelling game to cover up the true purpose of learning with the mask of a game).

Above and beyond these commonly used strategies, there are people who have been trying to push the battle to a whole new level: they have dived into the core of the monster to detect those ingredients that have made it so evilly appealing and addictive. They are the researchers from both sides of the battle field: learning scientists and game designers. And they found out that designing a good game follows the same instructional-design principles that have made learning happen in an effective and pleasant way:

• it engages the player/student with the appropriate level of challenges
• it rewards the player/student with incentives (points, scores, levels, and/or encouraging words)
• it offers chances for nonwinners to try again
• it provides rules and support in clear and intuitive ways
• it fosters a sense of competition either with others or with the player him or herself
• it puts the player/student in the driver’s seat to make choices and to control the progress
• it offers a combination of consistent elements (so you don’t get lost) and surprises (so you don’t get bored)
• it calls for sensory involvement of eyes, hand(s), and brain
• it makes it possible for one to play as someone else
• it connects the players and/or forms a community

(This list will grow longer after more ideas and practices are shared by DePaul faculty at the Annual DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference—Playing with Purpose: Apply Game Design Principles for Learning, on April 20th, 2012. Please stay tuned for the Teaching Commons announcement.)

I hope as you read through this list, you will share my feeling that it is not just games that are everywhere—those game ingredients are easy to find in our lives and in our teaching practices. The other day, when Grant got back from his Chinese school, he gestured a high five to me—“Mom, guess what, I earned eight points for my team today!” I heard my heart chirping with gratitude to his teacher who probably hadn’t noticed that she had just “game-ized” a dry character quiz.

Dr. James Paul Gee said, “Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates).” By making it explicit, the game-design principles can offer us some clue to establish those right conditions so that the misconception of learning-as-work will be corrected by learners who then would reclassify their act of gaining knowledge as a leisure activity.

One evening after finishing my work-late day, I came home to find my husband battling with our five-year-old daughter and six-year-old son on the living room floor. With my daughter fiercely grabbing Daddy’s legs, my son pulled the pillow from his hand and jumped underneath the coffee table—“touchdown!” he yelled. As the two little ones marched on for another round of football, I heard my husband stopping them, “Grant, what was you score? OK, 38… So with a touch down, you get 6. What is your score now? What about the one point for the kick….”

As he paused to add the numbers up in his head, my little football player had no clue that he was taking a math class in disguise. But for the Daddy, he surely was game in catching a teachable moment to build some learning—thanks to that ten years spousal influence!

When was the last time you felt a sense of accomplishment so gratifying that you threw your hands above your head and shook your fists with pride and elation? This gesture has been identified by psychologists as a universal expression made by people of all ages all around the world when they feel a sense of personal triumph. Italians call this feeling fiero, and the term has been adopted by game-designers to describe one of the most essential feelings a good game should provide.

In Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal proposes that most people’s everyday lives are shockingly fiero-deficient, and I have to agree. Most of us don’t complete our workdays with a fist-shaking gesture or spontaneous dance as we revel in our daily achievements, and much of our leisure time is spent on escapist forms of entertainment. If you can remember the last time you experienced a true fiero moment, chances are it was vicarious (e.g., watching a football player score a last-minute touchdown) or of no use to anyone in the real world (e.g., defeating a challenging level in Angry Birds).

McGonigal wants to change all that. To make the case for the ambitious assertion found in her book’s subtitle, she focuses on three key points.

1. Reality is filled with tedious obligations and overwhelming problems that leave human beings feeling bored, powerless, and isolated.
2. Games are humanity’s most effective tools for fostering engagement, empowerment, motivation, human connection, and a sense of accomplishment.
3. The same principles that make games so rewarding and addictive can be used to change how we feel about and tackle unpleasant and daunting tasks in the real world—from cleaning our toilets to reducing global energy consumption.

To provide specific strategies for translating the best qualities of a good game to the real world, McGonigal proposes fourteen “fixes” for reality. Almost all of these fixes can be applied to education, and I hope to eventually assemble a group of DePaul faculty to read the book and discuss them further. For now, however, I’d like to focus on one of my favorites: “Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them Most.”

To introduce this fix, McGonigal describes a talk she gave at a conference in which she lamented,

‘If I have one regret in life, it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.’ Technically speaking, it’s true: if you were to add up every A I’ve gotten in my real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn’t come close to my World of Warcraft character’s intellect stat. Never mind the fact that there’s no score at all for getting smarter once you’re out of school.

McGonigal frequently refers to the motivational power of “leveling up”—a concept commonly found in role-playing games that provides players with progress milestones and encourages them to keep striving for higher levels of expertise. When a player levels up, it means his or her character has accumulated enough experience points to get improved strength, stamina, weapons, or other tools to help the player complete increasingly challenging missions.

In some games, completely leveling up a character can take hundreds of hours of gameplay. Yet players are rarely daunted by these lofty requirements because they are provided with a steady stream of smaller victories and positive feedback as they move closer to their next goal. During her conference talk, McGonigal mentioned that she wished some of this positive reinforcement could be extended to reality, allowing friends and strangers to give her experience points in recognition of her latest achievements. As a result, an audience member at the conference created plusoneme.com. The site bills itself as “gold stars for grownups,” and it provides a simple online tool that allows users to quickly recognize each other whenever someone demonstrates an admirable trait.

Initially, I thought, “What a great idea! Who doesn’t love to be recognized for their efforts? And wouldn’t it be great in an online course? This could make students feel more valued and connected without a big fuss or hokey bonding activities.” I even signed up for an account on plusoneme.com to try it out, but my blind adoration for the site was short-lived. Within a day or two, I opened my mailbox and pulled out the latest issue of The Atlantic. The headline, “How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining Our Kids,” practically leaped off the page.

The text and image on the cover were promoting an article by Lori Gottlieb titled, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” Based on the headline and article title, it should come as no surprise that Gottlieb is one of many pundits blaming the indulgent parenting methods of the last few decades for creating a generation of entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed kids who are now entitled, neurotic, self-absorbed adults. It’s a backlash parade with Amy Chua serving as the Grand Marshal for 2011.

McGonigal seems to agree that most people born around 1980 or later are particularly frustrated and bored with reality. However, instead of blaming parenting trends, she points out that these younger generations have grown up with engaging, empowering games, and that these games have made the shortcomings of reality more obvious and stifling than they have ever felt before. Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle through humiliation or forcing a toddler to play piano until her fingers bleed, scholars like McGonigal ask, “Is there a way to increase motivation, productivity, and fulfillment by turning the task at hand into a game?”

In McGonigal’s world, the answer is almost always yes. In one example, she notes that she and her husband have used the website Chore Wars to turn everyday household chores into competitive challenges. In the game, chores are assigned various point values, with the most unpleasant tasks receiving the highest number of points. By default, the points that players accumulate in Chore Wars have no material value. In McGonigal’s case, the current high-score holder has the right to choose the music whenever she and her husband drive somewhere together.

McGonigal claims this simple and free reward system has changed the way she and her husband view everyday housekeeping. She says the Chore Wars over-the-top fantasy world, in which users can collect experience points every time they “conjure clean clothes” or “rid the kingdom of toilet bowl stains,” has left her home cleaner than it has ever been. While I doubt that driving-music veto power would motivate me to clean my bathtub, McGonigal does provide more than her own household as a case study. Other users claim that Chore Wars’ has turned their children into an army of competitive cleaning machines, which I’m sure most parents would agree speaks volumes to the power of a little virtual encouragement.

That’s great for McGonigal, who could probably game her way through a root canal, and for kids, who aren’t embarrassed to think of a duster as a magic wand. But what about the rest of us? Can we really use game principles to make completing our grown-up, mundane obligations more gratifying?

At the risk of sounding like an over-indulged millennial, I wouldn¹t mind a little excitement and a virtual gold star once in a while for all my hard work. And I’m not ashamed if it takes a little imagination to get others to participate. After all, fiero is in short supply in these troubled times, particularly here in the land of Scholarshire, where the shadow of the evil Lord Profitus has cast a pall of terror across the land. If all it took was a kind word of praise in ye mystical comment box below for my blogger character to level up, wouldst thou aid me in my quest? Or wouldst thou side with the dark forces and leave me to rot in a cubicle, denied any reason to throw my hands above my head and shake my fists with pride and elation?

Let’s make a game of it and see.