ABSTRACT

Is Higher Education the new playground of gamification? From improving the learners satisfaction to the return on investment, serious games and gamification are representing new opportunities and challenges for education stakeholders. Using a decade of experience in teaching, game design and research on the topic, we will share our framework and key performance indicators to help you design a gamification strategy for your organisation.

In the complex and sometimes slow-moving education sector, gamification and serious games are challenging not only for the learners and teachers’ practices but also for the organizations’ strategies. For example: Are the teachers becoming game masters? What type of skills should they develop? How new types of classrooms and pedagogical spaces be designed? Could games become a new intellectual contribution developed by the faculty? How can they be protected and promoted? We will detail the main opportunities and challenges of gamification in higher education and identify key performance indicators. We will analyse six strategies to implement gamification and serious games in higher education: Recycling, Ready-to wear, Home-made, ‘Haute-couture’, Co-branding and The Playground.

IN THIS WORKSHOP, YOU WILL:

• Understand the key concepts of gamification
• Explore 6 different strategies for higher education organizations
• Define Key Performance Indicators
• Identify what could be the relevant strategy for your own organisation
• Play! (an ice breaker)

WORKSHOP FORMAT

We will present the challenges of introducing gamification to higher education establishments and we will provide examples of games, in addition to playing games, a great way to break the ice! We will detail the 6 strategies and give the participants the framework to identify their own. We will discuss the types of initiatives that could be launched in a short term period to test this strategy.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

ABOUT GRENOBLE ECOLE DE MANAGEMENT (GEM)

Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM), has developed a unique expertise in Serious Games and Gamification for Innovation. During the last 8 years, we have developed a brand of games for higher and executive education, including video games, board games and gamified experiences such as escape games. We have designed them in order to support the journey of our students, from recruitment (candidate selection can be done through a creativity game), to training (our students use serious games to learn and experience mindfulness, customer profiling etc.), and the job fairs (the job selection process is done by means of an escape game).

We have designed games such as “Tech it!” to imagine products and services using one of the 75 real nano-technologies created in research labs, the Cubification method, which turns a Rubik’s cube into a creativity tool, “21 Days: The Innovation Quest” which turns an innovation into a routine, amongst many others. We have developed a Serious Game Masters Certificate to train lecturers on how to deliver a gamified learning experience. We have created “The GEM Playground”, a space for students, experts and companies to test and create new serious games. We have defined a clear strategy and reorganized our value chain to integrate gamification as a key asset. We are fully convinced that games can make a difference in education and have a strong social impact. With this know-how, experience and vision, we now strive to share our best practices with education stakeholders.

We have been participating in Reimagine Education for several years and we have learned a lot from these experiences.

The first year we were not even selected, as were not ready. This experience allowed us to learn and be ready for the second year when we were selected. The third and fourth years, our projects won awards.

Truly understanding the philosophy and the selection criteria of Reimagine Education, has led us to change the way we work. From concept development, resource allocation, planning to campaign creation, we have grown and adapted.

We have now evolved to the next step in which we want to share our experience and “give back”. Our niche expertise is in games and gamification development for education, higher education in particular. We can of course explain how to design a game, however, our real added value is in defining gamification strategies. We have developed a framework that allows us to identify best gamification strategy for each organisation’s need. Each gamification strategy developed will respond to each organisation’s goals, expertise and target audiences. We will share and discuss this in further detail in our proposal.