“The debate about which is better, face-to-face learning or online learning is fast becoming obsolete,” says Jennifer Berghage, an instructional designer at Pennsylvania State University. The common goal is that “an online course should be, above all, engaging, so that the learner enjoys the learning and is able to not only assimilate it but retain it and apply it.”

Online courses are revolutionizing formal education, and have opened a new genre of outreach on cultural and scientific topics. These courses deliver a series of lessons to a web browser or mobile device, to be conveniently accessed anytime, anyplace.

An “online course is designed as a built environment for learning. It’s constructed as an experience that can be followed sequentially or can be accessed throughout the designated time period,” says Wendy Woon, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s a directed learning process, comprised of educational information (articles, videos, images, web links), communication (messaging, discussion forums) and some way to measure students’ achievement.

“There is no single formula for what constitutes an excellent online course,” says Berghage, though in good courses the “student feels a great sense of community and investment in the endeavor.” But an online course is more than the presentation of information or lectures. “Online courses require interaction, direction, and feedback,” says Jean Mandernach, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University.

The following are some overall dimensions to consider for teaching your target audience or professionals in your field, and possibly creating a new revenue stream.

Academic/professional 

In academic (K-12 and higher ed) and professional (e.g., continuing education) settings, the student’s primary motivation is to advance their professional or academic career. Courses are designed around the objectives of the school administration.

The number of students in kindergarten through 12th grade in the U.S. taking an online course as part of their school was estimated by the U.S. Dept. of Education to be 1.8 million enrollments in 2009-10, 74% of which was High School. Of those, 62% were to recover course credits from classes missed or failed, 47% were dual High School and college credit, 29% were AP, and 27 were career and technical education. In Canada, ~4% of  K–12 students were engaged distance education. Full time K-12 cyber schools are also gaining popularity, currently estimated to be 225,000 in the U.S. In China, more than 200 online schools serve 600,000+ students (iNACOL PDF).

Soldiers stationed overseas can complete their coursework via online courses.

Enrollment is higher for higher-ed, where 31% of U.S. students (over 6.1 million students) took at least one course online in fall 2010, and annual growth continues at ~10%. Some higher-ed degree programs are entirely bought online, and are ranked by U.S. News. For-profit institutions such as University of Phoenix, DeVry University, and American Public University draw the highest enrollments, and have helped scare and propel the industry online, but have not yet earned academic respect.

Social studies teacher in a recorded video.

For academic online courses to work, parents and students have to be extremely self motivated. “Unfocused, passive learners do much better in an environment where the adult owns the responsibility for the learning,” says David Haglund, Principal of the Riverside Virtual School.

Some K-12 school systems create their own courses, but most contract them from private companies like K12, and Connections Academy, a unit of Pearson. Some courses are fantastic, but many are poor, or worse. The NYT drew attention to the shortcomings of online learning and of K12 last month in “Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools,” and the WSJ recently profiled two families using virtual schools, with and without success. In higher-ed there are also commercial providers, e.g., Straighterline charges $99 to register for a month, plus $39 a course, and thousands of less-selective schools now accept 23 of their accredited courses for transfer credit.

Professional learning and continuing education are great for online courses because students are motivated and focused. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com  target the professional skills market. Training marketplace OpenSesame aggregates training content from 100+ providers with 10,000+ courses. “We’re creating Amazon.com for courses,” said Tom Turnbull VP at OpenSesame.

Personal learning & happy students

For outreach, the best models of online courses are coming from the realm of personal learning. These courses are free of the constraints of K-12 and higher education, and are designed to delight and satisfy students.

Substantial numbers of learners have taken online courses offering personal knowledge. This kind lifelong learning is for “anyone who wants to continue learning and building new skills once their formal education is done — no matter where they live, what their degree of education, how old they are, or whether they do it formally in the classroom or use less traditional resources,” says Dan Colman, founder of Open Culture and director of the Continuing Studies program at Stanford.

There’s an expanding market for personal learning. DailyPath delivers “actionable lessons” by email, MightyBell lets users post experiences and goals that others can achieve by completing a series of steps. Craftsy offers delightful video-based courses on crafty topics.

Credit or not

Credit introduces many constraints, with standardized curricula, accreditation, and requirements to work with the ‘learning management systems” large institutions use to manage students and teachers. When credit is offered, the course builds toward student’s graduation, qualification or long-term career goals, thus, students (or whomever funds their education) are willing to pay substantial enrollment fees, and endure crummy experiences.

If credit and grading are not a concern, there’s a lot more flexibility. Several schools have been experimenting with putting quality audio and video recordings of charismatic professors from top colleges online. These can be viewed in a web page (e.g., YouTube), or downloaded to listen later (as iTunes podcasts). iTunes makes it easy for learners to access 350,000+ free lectures, videos, films, and other educational resources. To find the gems, Colman’s Open Culture site indexes 400 free online courses from top universities.

Stanford Engineering professors recently offered three of the school’s most popular computer science courses for free online in Fall 2011. These included assignments and online discussion, and thousands of students who completed the course received a statement of accomplishment.

Measuring up

In formal learning, assessment is the currency of progress. Good scores on assignments and tests are central. Creative teachers have invented other ways to assess learning, often by having students create projects and presentations.

Assessment is more challenging in a virtual world, where it’s harder to measure quantitative and intangible aspects of learning, and it’s easy for student to cheat with conventional assessments. Assessment should include “intangible aspects, and should also offer multiple means of demonstrating learning, including individual and group projects and online presentations,” says Liz Pape, president of VHS, a nonprofit virtual school and consultancy.

The more interesting question is how to incorporate assessment into personal learning, when there’s no credit. Assessment, if done in an appealing way, can encourage students, help them track their progress, and gain a sense of accomplishment. See my recent article on gamification for a variety of ideas on how to follow student’s achievements and progress.

Assessment is also vital feedback loop so you can improve your course.

Human touch

The more human, or human-like interaction the better.

With the instructor — Feedback from the instructor on an essay, assignment or quiz, or answers to questions prompted from a lecture. Online, the feedback can be private (by email or direct message), or public (discussion forum). The instructor can moderate the online discussions, “inserting some comments into the discussions to keep students on task, add clarity to a discussion, or ask another question to get students to think deeper,” says Pape.

With other students — Students can interact with the rest of their cohort in the discussion areas of a course. “This kind of course cannot be self-paced, because you need all the students interacting together around the course content at approximately the same time,” says Pape. Students enjoy working with other classmates in discussions, or perhaps group projects. Online discussion allows more students to discuss than could in a short in-person class, gives a space for timid students to speak up, and helps mute overbearing or bullying students.

A personal style — Lectures should give a personal feel, as if directly talking to the student via video chat. One approach is to use second-person phrases that directly address “you” the student, as in, “Now I’m going to show you…” and “so you’ve made a new discovery, that…” Use of second person has a long history in guidebooks, self-help books, do-it-yourself manuals, and other forms of writing that intend to address the reader without the instructor actually being present. Likewise, online assessment can lend a human touch, “Nice job! You got 3/4 correct!”

The sky’s the limit?

There are some practical limits. For example, an instructor can only provide personalized feedback to a relatively small number of students. Five minutes per question, for 25 student questions, is over two hours of work. If the feedback requires more critical analysis, online teaching quickly becomes a full time job. There are also practical limits as to the size of online discussion communities. Too small, and there’s no discussion, but over a few hundred students, and conversation gets swamped. For some courses, it’s appropriate to answer the most popular questions. Google’s moderator service allows students to vote on the most popular questions, allowing thousands of students to participate in choosing questions. Questions about assignments or technical issues can be public questions.

Despite these scalability hiccups, growth of all kinds of online courses will be explosive. The big money will be in for-credit courses, but there’s still huge potential for personal knowledge courses in areas of arts, culture and science.

Harvard professor Clay Christensen, well-known for his academic work on disruptive innovations, wrote a book, Disrupting Class, looking at changes in how people learn. In a recent interview, he said:

I think that not only are we ready but adoption is occurring at a faster rate than we had thought… We believe that by the year 2019 half of all classes for grades K-12 will be taught online… The rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize his or her fullest potential….”

Sources: Lede robot illustration adapted from Stanford School of Engineering Initiative.

Gameplay has a lot to teach us about motivating participation through joy. ‘Gamification’ is a new term, coined in 2008, for adapting game mechanics into non-game setting — such as building online communities, education and outreach, marketing, or building educational apps. Here are some ideas for how to do it.

Achievements

Badges, trophies and points represent having accomplished something. Since antiquity, people have been honored with medals, crowns and other decorations. Wreaths made of bay laurel were awarded to Greek athletes, and worn by Roman poets (e.g., Ovid, at left).

Judd Antin, at Yahoo! Research, in a talk this summer noted, “Closer to home, the Boy Scouts of America’s iconic merit badges promote the acquisition of specific skill-sets as diverse as nuclear science and basketry. One of the first large-scale implementations of badges in online games began in 2002 with Microsoft’s Xbox Live service. Since that time, badges have become a fixture in many games.”

Achievements can be easy, difficult, surprising, funny, accomplished alone or as a group. FourSquare uses badges to promote location-sharing via “check-ins,” StackOverflow and Quora use rating systems to encourage members to write quality answers to posted questions, KhanAcademy uses cute meteorite badges to reward correct answers (see KhanAcademy “Going Transonic” badge above left), and Wikipedia encourages hardcore contributors to post barnstars and WikiLove to other member’s profiles. Many shopping and social media sites have some form of member ranking.

“This has already occurred in education for a long time with things such as merit certificates and awards,” says Australian science teacher Alice Leung, but “gamification is more than that “because the game guides learners towards those goals, and gives constant feedback.”

It’s not about winners and losers, says Leung. Gamification leads to fewer “losers” because the education is personalized for each learner, and “students feel safe to take risks in their learning.” Rather than most students having to work at the same pace, with gamification, “students work at their own pace to gain achievements.”

Judd and his colleague Elizabeth Churchill outline five key psychological functions of badges:

• Setting goals: Badges challenge participants to reach a higher mark, and are best when they are just outside of comfortable reach, and when participants can see their progress.
• Instruction: Badges embody the social norms of a system, exemplifying activities and interactions that are valued — i.e., what participants should do. — In a social setting, a party organizer could reward positive social behaviors by assigning roles to event attendees (e.g., matchmaker, deep talker, explorer) and awarding prizes for fulfilling their roles.
• Reputation: Badges encapsulate a participant’s interests, expertise and past interactions — providing an easy way to gauge the trustworthiness of other people, the reliability of content, and assess whether a participant is a casual or fanatical community member.
• Status & affirmation: Badges serve as a status symbol, advertising a participant’s achievements and accomplishments without explicit bragging. Some people are highly driven by status rewards (displayed in leaderboards, class rankings, etc.), but most people are more driven more when their work interacts with others’ and when their recognition creates enduring artefacts (e.g., school newsletters, posters, wikis, blogs, etc.).
• Group identification: Badges bind a group together around their shared experiences, lend a sense of solidarity, and promote collaboration.

A limitation of achievements is that they are external motivators, and only a subset of people really care about external recognition, so don’t rely on achievements alone to drive interest in your project.

In a classroom setting, Leung cautions, “If gamification is implemented in a superficial way (just points and badges), it is just a layer of extrinsic motivation, which may work well for younger students but not for older students…” it needs to include “strong narratives, goal-orientated lessons and personalized learning.”

Other game mechanics

Many other game dynamics can help engage your audience. Dynamics that draw on the human psyche, create feedback loops, or lead participants to accumulate skills or accomplishments. Here are some more:

• Appointments are specific times/places a participants must participate. (e.g., FourSquare and geocaching are based on physical places; Farmville requires players to return to harvest their crops after a specific amount of time has passed after planting; last summer, nine Smithsonian museums cooperated in a mobile game based on SCVNGR called goSmithsonian Trek, played on iPhones or Android phones.)
• Behavioral momentum is people’s tendency to keep doing what they have been doing.
• Blissful productivity is a sense of accomplishment, which might be missing elsewhere in someone’s life.
• Cascading Information Theory says information should be released in the minimum possible snippets, as not to overwhelm.
• Community collaboration rallies people to work together to solve a problem or a challenge. Learners are more motivated if their success at tasks is dependent on other group members, not just their own scores. Cooperative motivators should be stronger than competitive motivators. (e.g., DARPA balloon challenge.)
• Countdowns give participants a short amount of time to do something, and can spike participation. Arcade games often have a countdown. (e.g., Bejeweled Blitz gives players 30 seconds to get as many points as they can.)
• Discovery or Exploration delight participants with the surprise of something new, sparking their curiosity. The element of surprise can come from unraveling a complex subject, or challenging preconceived notions. A slick presentation will attract attention from its technical novelty, but thoughtful curiosity comes from sustained engagement that makes learners think, gain productivity, filter information, or create. Discovery works because it is mostly an internal driver, but some people can be encouraged by giving them a bonus for exploring, e.g., how many new pages they read each week.
• Epic meaning lends a sense of achieving something great, awe-inspiring, and bigger than oneself. Meaning can drive people to participate in citizen science, or other crowd sourcing projects like Zooninverse. Meaning also comes from creating an environment that does exist, such as inventing characters, locations, objects; and from applying a skill to that environment (e.g., simulation and roll employing games). Richer learning happens when learners connect new learning to prior knowledge through their narrative structure. (e.g., The online game, War of Warcraft’s ongoing story line motivates players to devote hours to the game, and also work outside the game, where volunteers have created a huge wiki to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.) What’s challenging or an interesting fantasy will vary from person to person, and vary over the course of  a person’s learning life.
• Free lunch is when when participants feel they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. (e.g., Groupon gives participants the sense of a great deal because other people have also signed up.)
• Infinite gameplay does do not have an explicit end. (e.g., Casual games like Farmville have a static, positive state.)
• Levels are a system, or “ramp,” by which participants are rewarded for accumulating points. Often features or abilities are unlocked as participants progress to higher levels. Leveling is one of the highest components of motivation for gamers. There are typically three types of leveling ramps: flat, exponential and wave function. — An example in an online community is giving frequent contributors special perks, like the capability to moderate, or the ability to unlock new content.
• Loss aversion is the drive to avoid punishment. (e.g., In Farmville, player receive alerts so they remember to log in and harvest their crops, other games have decays of points which require active participation to maintain.)
• Lottery determines winners based solely on chance. This can create a high level of anticipation, but can quickly alienate losers.
• Ownership gives participants a sense of control, and fosters loyalty. In the game world, participants’ decisions have consequences; winning isn’t dependent on completely random factors. Empowering learning environments depend on making learner’s choices tied to significant and meaningful outcomes. Learners must feel they are capable of succeeding. Conversely, too many choices can swamp and frustrate a learner.
• Points are a running numerical value given for any single action or combination of actions. They are a form of achievement, and can indicate a participant’s progression in completing itemized tasks. Points can be delivered as virtual currency. Here’s a video of adding points to a recycling bin — making it an arcade game — dramatically increasing recycling.

  //www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSiHjMU-MUo

• Quests & challenges – Challenges usually have a time limit or a competition, and Quests are a journey of obstacles which participants must overcome. — Learners prefer the right level of challenge, with clear goals and feedback on performance. Goals can be relevant for allowing a learner to do something new (functionally useful), feel emotional connection (fantasy relevance), or social relevance. Uncertainty also matters. If you know you will triumph, you stop caring. Uncertainty can be boosted by varying difficulty levels, hiding information, or otherwise randomizing.
• Reward schedules are a timeframe and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.
• Urgent optimism is extreme self motivation. A desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
• Virality is a game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people).

You can combine these mechanics. In the following 20 minute video from TED, Jane McGonigal talks about the lure of the ‘Epic win,’ and how gaming can make a better world:
[ted id=799 lang=eng]

Keep in mind, gamification does not necessarily mean playing games, though there is certainly a place for games in outreach & education. Gamification is not serious games, and it is not playful interactions (see chart at left). Though, there is continuum from games with a purpose to subtly incorporating some principles of gameplay into other projects.

Gamification “really has little to do with games or video games,” rather it is about giving people proper, faster feedback says Ryan Elkins, an entrepreneur who started gamification platform company IActionable. “It helps new people learn what is expected of them and that they are on the right track. It gives experienced people reasons to continue by quantifying their intrinsic motivation. It helps provide context to users so they can make better decisions. It helps individuals track personal growth and progress with measurable goals and a path to mastery.”

No size fits all. People might be driven by (a) a desire for achievement and the prestige of accomplishment; (b) the joy and delight of exploration, satisfying their curiosity; (c) a draw to socialize and connect with other people; or (d) a thirst for competition. — Your audience (e.g., students, the public or your community) will all have their own unique motivations for learning, participating in you projects, or using your resource. — And you don’t want to accidentally alienate some of your participants who don’t care about petty tokens, or make the game elements overwhelm the core job to be done.

Two examples 

A classroom example is from Leung, who created a unit called ‘The Great Science Race‘ with game mechanics like narrative, quests and achievement badges. See her post with positive data on student responses.

The LA Times ran a story last year: “Michael Pusateri is a 43-year-old senior vice president at the Disney-ABC Television Group, but he still doesn’t eat his vegetables. So in October he joined Health Month, an online game that allows him to compete against 16,000 other users in striving toward his goals — which include cycling 80 miles a week and going on a weekly date with his wife… When he made progress, he earned life points and raised his ranking. When he failed, he lost points but could ask other players to take pity and ‘heal’ him by giving him virtual ‘fruit.’ The game prepared him for his first triathlon. ‘My wife has been after me for years to eat more fruit and vegetables and bring my lunch to work, and it was, ‘Next week, I’ll do it next week,” says Pusateri, an avid video game player and father of two. ‘Just because it was on this dumb website I actually did it.'”

Gaining popularity

Gamification is gaining traction as a word. The term was first used in 2008, and became more popular in late 2010 (see Google Trends graph at right). In online marketing circles, gamification tends to focus on achievements because they can be readily added to web sites and apps. Vendors like Badgeville, Bunchball, Bigdoor Media, and GetGlue jumped to deliver a service layer of reward and reputation systems with points, badges, levels and leader boards.

But gamification is much more, and is a useful mental framework for planning how to incentivize your audience to be active and productive.

Leung says, “You don’t fail in games. If you don’t pass a stage, you reflect back on what you need to change and improve on and you play again. This is a vital element of gaming that will vastly change students’ academic achievements.”

Sources: The structure and much of this article comes from  a list at the gamification wiki. Some background from instructional designer and blogger Dianne Rees, who writes about education psychologist Jerome Bruner’s work on intrinsic motivation in 1966, and Malone and Lepper’s 1987 taxonomy of intrinsic motivation. See also papers from a 2011 CHI workshop (PDF). 

Update 20-Oct-2011: Added several quotes from Alice Leung.