Karen Jeannette
Academic Technologist,
University of Minnesota-Duluth
A Creative Learning Management System Hack to Improve Student Engagement and Motivation
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 | 2:15PM–3:00PM ET
Viewing Location:
Online
Session Type:
Poster Session
Delivery Format:
Poster
We all can agree that COVID-19 has forced educators to rethink their pedagogies and embrace technology and the learning management system (LMS) as an integral component in the delivery of teaching and learning. Although most universities have seen greater adoption of LMS during the pandemic, we cannot ignore the fact that most learning management systems lack interactive capabilities. As a result, student engagement is significantly affected. Although augmented and virtual reality, video games, and technology simulations can increase student engagement, rarely do they seamlessly integrate with an LMS. Additionally, learner equity and accessibility to such technologies is challenging. We present an integrated approach, a creative hack, to overcome these challenges while aiming to increase learners’ mastery of the subject, their intrinsic motivation and engagement with the materials. We conceive the learning to be project-based broken into quests, to which gameful pedagogy principles are applied. Using technologies such as Thing Link, we create an immersive environment and a pathway to guide the learners through the project, transforming their experience with the LMS and the materials. We provide templates for the quests, the interactive components and the LMS that can be easily applied to a wide variety of disciplines including the humanities and social sciences that are often left out of project-based learning, and believe that the gains from the combined methods can be exponential.
