Using gamification as an incentive for revision

Hi, my name is Teegan Green and I’m a lecturer here at the UQ Business School at the University of Queensland [UQ]. I teach into the postgraduate cohort in the Master of Business.

I’m really passionate about integrating digital technologies into the teaching and learning that we do, and I do, here at the University of Queensland. And I’m always on the lookout for what’s happening in the teaching and learning space.

The course I teach into is delivered in hybrid mode, so that means we had external and internal enrolments in this course for the first time. Now, that was a new opportunity that I thought we could use to embrace the gamification of learning via the integration of some new teaching technologies that are supported here at UQ.

So, when I heard about The Chase pilot, I contacted the ITaLI [Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation] e-learning design team to find out a little bit more.

Hi, my name is Iliria Stenning. I’m a senior e-learning adviser here at UQ. I had the pleasure of working with Dr Teegan Green, one of the early adopters of H5P’s The Chase, which aimed to promote student engagement with course content through gamification.

I initially met with Teegan to provide technical advice on how to implement The Chase in her course and later met with her tutors, Rashida and Usha, to guide them through the process of running the Chase live prior to their week-12 tutorials.

I signed on to The Chase pilot course that the ITaLI team was running during semester two this year. We used this as a gamification strategy to provide some revision content for the students.

So I wrote a set of revision questions that we deployed during our live tutorials – we had a flipped-classroom modality this semester where I pre-recorded our weekly content, but we delivered live short-form content as a supplement to our tutorials. We found that this really worked as a revision strategy for students, engaging them at the very end of the semester, when they were gearing up towards that final piece of assessment, which in our course was an online final exam – again, something that we had never done in this course before, having it delivered online.

Hi, all. I am Rasheda Keane and I am a tutor at the University of Queensland. I have had the chance to work with Dr Teegan Green. We had to go to the Blackboard page: The Chase was already set up for our internal and external modes. The students got really involved with it, using different icons. I just had to set up the time so they could read the questions and then answer them.

It was a new approach to show them that the course can be applied in different ways and they can learn from different perspectives.

After they did The Chase, they asked a few questions and then asked for the results. When they saw who did the best and how many answers they got right, they actually wanted to see where they went wrong in relation to the topics they had been taught so far. I really enjoyed the response I got from the students. It was really quite worthwhile using The Chase.

I reflected on three key benefits that I found particularly relevant for this course and which I think other course coordinators and lecturers would find really insightful. The first was the ability to access cutting-edge technologies using the H5P platform, on which The Chase game concept is based. You can then build specific, curated sets of quiz questions, written by yourself or taken from other sources, and deploy them as a quiz set within The Chase format.

The second benefit was that the intergradation of the gamification of learning was a huge incentive for trying out something new and taking a bit of a risk with a new technology. Because our learners are increasingly online, their willingness to embrace new technologies and new types of learning is growing.

Third was the ability to provide personalised feedback to the learners during tutorials.

One other thing I did was to record myself going through the quiz answers, something that could be accessed by students who could not attend that final tutorial in the semester. 

We are catering to a large course of 100 postgraduate students in the Master of Business, so it was really beneficial to be able to integrate this as an on-site learning experience – one that could also be delivered online to our externally enrolled cohort, promoting a healthy approach to revision for the final exams.

Teegan Green is a lecturer in marketing and Rasheda Keane is a tutor, both at UQ Business School; Iliria Stenning is a senior e-learning adviser in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI). All are at the University of Queensland.

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