Teaching Gamification
A few weeks ago, Dan Hunter and I wrapped up the first-ever MBA course on gamification. One of the joys of teaching is that it pushes you to organize and present your thoughts in a way that makes sense. It forces you into conversations involving perspectives you may not have considered. When the process is successful, the students aren’t the only ones who learn something. That was certainly true of our Wharton gamification course.
The course was an experiment in many ways. Just dealing with such new subject matter was challenging enough, but we also decided to make this a project course that incorporated various elements of technology, as well as a pre-release course management system. Some of our ideas worked brilliantly; others fell flat. Bugs in the course software caused pain for everyone. We and the students both realized early on that we were cramming too much into a half-semester course. Some of the industry luminaries we brought in for live video chats didn’t seem as knowledgeable as the students. There weren’t pre-packaged case studies like most other MBA courses, because no one has written them yet in this field.
We took all of that as an indication that we’re on the right track. We learned a tremendous amount, which we’ll use to revise the course next year. Our students mocked up real-world gamification projects, and learned the basics of game design, the psychology of motivation, the state of serious business research on games, the legal and ethical dimensions of gamification, and why it’s so hard to define “fun,” among many things. For me, the course reinforced that gamification will soon be a common business practice in marketing, management, and operations, but we still have a long way to go in understanding it.
If you’re interested, all the course discussions, student projects, and class session videos are available on the course website. We’ve made it all public because our educational mission doesn’t stop with our students. We’re already using what we’ve learned from the course in other contexts.
