Design and Development of Games for Learning
Institution: MITx (edX)
Date: April 1, 2015 - June 3, 2015
Bio: This course is specifically about the design, development, and integration of learning games for the classroom. Rather than using lectures to instruct on the topic, all of the videos in the course are interviews or discussions with both developers and teachers in the field about each weeks theme. All of these videos were relatively well produced and extremely insightful on the subject matter.
The course also involves a large amount of self motivation and community involvement. They created a separate forum outside of the edX platform for students to collaborate and discuss issues, or form groups with specific niches or interest in this field.
Though there was a running project for students to design their own game; rather than use the peer feedback system integrated into edX, this course asked students to use a more informal peer review system on the courses own forums. The assessment for this course was essentially an honor system of check boxes as to 'did you do this weeks activity, complete your assignments, and participate in peer review'. So you are only going to get out of it what you put into it.
Accomplishments: I completed all of the videos, readings, and activity breaks in the course. This course also inspired me to create the teachers guide for the narrative crypto challenge I helped create for Khan Academy.