I first came across this concept in late 2016. I attended a one day course about Gamification by a former senior of IIUM (Zayd Ali Alsagof). I never met him while at IIUM. He was two years senior. The chances that I would take the same class would be slim if he majored in psychology. Most of the time, we would take the courses based on level (of difficulty). Looking at the course code, you can understand that the course is meant for students at certain year of study. It does not mean that if you are a first year student, you can’t take courses which are meant for final year student. It is just that you will “struggle” a lot because the courses would be much complicated and most instructors would assume that you already know some of the theories that you would learn in different classes that you take in junior year.
So, here I am teaching at a university and yet I am struggling to learn about the current things in education. I went to this gamification workshop on volunteer basis because I feel that I need to improve my teaching practice. I want to “inject” something new in my teaching every semester. That’s my aim. In sha Allah
I learn a lot from the course. But there are so many things that I have yet to explore even though some of the things are not free like Prezi. or Padlet. One thing at a time.
One of the things that I immediately implement in my class is online assessment. It is not that we don’t have online assessment on UTM elearning, but the feature is different from other online assessment such as Quizziz, Kahoot! and such.
So, I tried Quizziz in my MPPU1024. The students felt excited because it is like playing a game, rather than taking a test. There are immediate feedback/answers using memes and there is also a ranking. Yup. All “players” will be ranked. At the end of semester, I asked the students to give me feedback about the activities that we did in class. Some of them give positive notes about Quizziz. I wrote a paper and presented it in a conference in 2017. Since then, I start to collect more data every time I use Quizziz in my class. But, it is kind of challenging to get feedback from students unless it is considered as a part of the grading. Another challenge, another way to tackle. One thing at a time. This is what make teaching interesting. There would always be challenges that you need to deal with. Never ends.