November 5, 2019, Shannon Mitchell
This month I had the opportunity to go to DevLearn 2019, an annual conference that covers what’s up and coming in digital learning and development! If you didn’t get to attend, here are some of the key trends I noticed coming out of DevLearn this year.
It seems like educators have been using the same grading method for years - a student learns the material, gets a grade, and that’s that. However, around DevLearn I was impressed to see a shift. In game design, we hate the idea of a “locked in” score. Scores are made to change! A core tenet of gaming is the ability to improve and do better each time. In a game, you learn what isn’t working, but always have that all-important “try again” button to play until you get it right.
It seems like the next wave of learning is moving more towards this game-inspired approach. Looking at what’s new in training I noticed that for many lessons instead of getting a grade at the end, you finish with a self-reflection. You figure out what you could be doing better and then can try again with a different approach. This really resonated with me, and I’m excited to see more educators trying this method in the next year. It’ll be interesting to see how education will look in the future if this trend continues. We may all end up as perpetual learners, always trying to get better and improve as long as there’s room to grow.
Given the huge push towards improvement rather than assessment, I was excited to see that educators are also pushing for games as learning tools, rather than just elements of a course. Leaderboards and badges often get used as a small way to bring games into learning, but they also have the limitation of feeling more like a “final” grade rather than offering feedback towards mastery. Don’t get me wrong - leaderboards and badges work well in a variety of contexts, but they’re best paired with an interaction that lets you practice while offering feedback on how to improve.
The tool I covered in my talk - Phaser 3 - is a free game engine for building out fully custom games from scratch. One of the things I love about it is that it opens up a whole world of teaching opportunities to instructional designers beyond the classic gamification elements. With new tools like Phaser 3, designers can make all sorts of activities, interactive stories, and simulations as they develop their course material. At DevLearn, it was clear that authoring tools are just getting more flexible, which means educators can really push the boundaries of design with their courses now more than ever.
In the past, games were often thought of as an expensive and hard to access approach to learning. This year though, I saw the opposite on display. Tools made specifically for gaming (web games, augmented reality, and virtual reality) are actually helping instructors to reach new audiences with a greater impact than ever before. This isn’t a huge surprise to us, but it’s great to see this trend continue to grow. A big reason my team chose the game engine Phaser 3 for Passport to Success was to make sure we could reach people on any device, even with low or limited access to the internet. We knew that we could customize what we were making to help get it to the most people possible. Likewise, VR is being used more and more to take people places they couldn’t otherwise go. In one example, I saw virtual reality was being used to train oncologists across the world on treating a rare form of leukemia. In the past training could only be done in one of the few specialized oncology labs in the US, however now training can be done anywhere with VR. In another example, VR was being used to help train emergency responders by letting them visit locations that wouldn’t be safe to visit in person.
In the recent past, games were seen as an exclusive, fancy way to get your material out there, but now more people are recognizing the ability that games have to deliver learning in approachable and accessible ways. The flexibility and customizable nature of games means you can make something that works exactly for an audience you might not otherwise have reached. At DevLearn it was amazing to see educators using games and gaming technology to solve problems that were previously huge hurdles in education.
I had a great time at DevLearn and it was really inspiring to think of new ways to pair education and gaming. I’d love to hear about what other people saw as interesting trends in education technology as we look around the corner at 2020. Have an idea about how we can use games to improve education? Reach out - I’d love to chat about it!
