Spotlight Gamification Expert: Kevin Werbach

As we move into our next installment of GSummit (June 10-13 in San Francisco), we look at our past GSummit speakers and experts that have helped shape the user engagement space. This week’s spotlight Gamification Expert is Kevin Werbach–Associate Professor at The Wharton School at UPenn and teacher in the massively successful online Gamification Class on…

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victor manrique

Victor Manrique on Teaching the World Gamification Design

Victor Manrique is a prominent gamification community member, author of EpicWinBlog, and professor of Iversity’s Gamification Design MOOC (also free!) who joined our weekly Gamification Revolution webshow to talk about teaching gamification design to the masses. He is joined by Gabe Zichermann to talk about his experiences teaching and discussed:

  • Differences between game design and gamification
  • Philosophies behind teaching a gamification Design MOOC
  • Learning other disciplines to strengthen gamification
  • Balancing game design

And much more! Watch their full interview below to get all the talking and be sure to join us this Thursday for our next episode featuring Sascha Goto of McKinsey to discuss his work in bringing gamification into IT Management. Click through to get show reminders!

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kevin werbach on teaching gamification at coursera - gsummit sf 2013

Kevin Werbach on Teaching Gamification at Coursera

Surely you must’ve heard of Kevin Werbach’s Coursera Course on gamification? (The next Coursera semester starts Jan 27th 2014)

Gamification is a hot growth industry, with billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of new jobs set to be created in the next decade. To accomplish this, organizations of all kinds will need to train and educate leaders of tomorrow on this critical discipline. But how do you teach a topic where core concepts are in a state of flux, examples and patterns are evolving rapidly and learners expect the entire experience to be fun and rewarding? Join Professor Werbach, teacher of the massively successful #Gamification12 MOOC as he discusses the hard-won lessons of teaching Gamification — and how this understanding can make any training, education or development process more successful for your organization. In this GSummit 2013 video expect to learn

  • Opportunities and dangers in the gamification of learning.
  • Techniques for effective gamification in educational settings.
  • How game thinking produced the highest engagement rates of any course on the Coursera massive online platform. (It’s not what you think!)

Watch the full video below! Also, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.

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andrew grauer course hero

Course Hero’s Knowledge Marketplaces and the Gamification of Education

We’re reading more and more about online education portals incorporating sophisticated game mechanics into its applications. There’s no doubt that education is a space ripe for gamification and in classrooms—both virtual and walled—educators are shifting their approach to offer a more personalized, yet interactive and adaptive curriculum. Course Hero, an online education start-up, has been engaging college students in its online learning community by using game mechanics from Bunchball for more than a year to great success. Harnessing the motivational power of games and applying it to real-world problems, Course Hero’s gamification elements motivate students to learn in a more interactive manner and urge them to care more about what they’re learning.

In this GSummit SF 2013 talk, Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer will share details on how participation on the site has increased by 25% since implementing gamified elements, as well as how the site has seen a 51% growth in badges awarded since February 2012. Watch the full video below.

Also, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.

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julia stiglitz pamela fox coursera

Achievement and Progress in Education: The Coursera Example

Coursera is hard at work transforming post-secondary education through its innovative partnerships and use of MOOC (Massively Online Open Course) approaches. Behind their breakneck success is the desire of learners around the world to progress in their own lives and achieve something greater than themselves. In this insightful session from GSummit SF 2013, Julia Stiglitz and Pamela Fox will share Coursera’s insights about the need for progress, what drives user behavior in a lifelong learning context, and how to deliver this sense of achievement intrinsically.

Want more GSummit videos? Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.

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How Gamification Can Create a Homeschool Education

Homeschooling has become one of the fastest growing forms of education, and gamification has become very integral to the way these children are learning.

When a parent decides to remove their child from school, many times it’s due to the boring nature of traditional classrooms, inflexible schedules, and just a general disagreement with the American education system but now there are a number of gamification tools that can solve these issues and make homeschooling better.

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Top Talks for Education Gamification at GSummit 2013 SF

The use of gamification is slowly gaining traction in the enterprise sector as the corporate workforce is warming up to the ideas of blending fun and engagement into the workplace. Unsurprisingly, this similar scenario is occurring within the education sector as well. Recent groundbreaking developments such as the use of collaborative platforms and massively online open courses purposes has redefined the traditional sense of education and teaching methodologies. With all this in mind, it leaves many to questions like how do we make sense of these developments, what does it mean for the future of learning and how does this affect the enterprise realm. However, fret not dear readers, as GSummit has an amazing line up of speakers to address these hot topics; here are some of our top picks for education gamification sessions.

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Prominent Gamifiers: Julia Stiglitz and Coursera

Coursera was a very integral part in growing the gamification community in 2012, largely due in part to Kevin Werbach’s class on gamification. However, Couresera’s ability to have effectively delivered a strong massive open online course (MOOC) is a testament to its ability to appeal to everyone’s intrinsic desires to learn. Its hard to believe how a system could appeal to 12 thousand students interested in gamification and have them complete 7 weeks of lectures, homeworks, and testing to receive a small certificate of completion. Coursera is doing something right and Julia Stiglitz is part of that team making it happen.

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