I can take it when those around me say, don’t you have enough to do without adding to your plate? Because I love it! It’s more like fun than anything being able to dive into something new, and since learning and learning tech is my passion, it’s more like down time than anything else. It’s really play time and of course since we’ve loved play time since we were kids, what’s not to love now?!
However, when I’m busy playing and learning I’m very bad at blogging, so let me catch you up!.
The summer of 2022 I dove into an online hybrid course to earn my CPTM certification which was a great fit for my background which is heavily vested in both business and learning. I very much enjoyed the course and was able to practice seeing learning through a new lens as we focused on the ROI of learning and how to get to the bottom line of the organizations objectives that drive the need for training and how to showcase the importance in a world that believes that training is a great place to target cutbacks if/when that time comes. In the end that type of cut really hits the bottom line harder than most people realize.
Thirsting for more and going in another direction I returned to engagement and retention and my belief that play pulls us into a world where a focus on these two things really drives effective transfer to long-term memory. After all that’s how we start learning, by playing. No wonder stories and play pull us back to them and we truly find power in play.
Our Surveyor Group
I joined a Sententia Games level one Surveyor certification course last fall and had a blast looking at game mechanics, why we are drawn to games and how to use them in a learning environment. Earning my badge was awesome, but I must admit seeing my team’s mock up of the game we collaborated to design showcased as a sample on their website… well that was even better.
Click here to check out a pdf of the the build document
I took the winter off but as January passed the level two certification was calling my name. So, despite a whirlwind of things going on around me I enrolled in the level two Journeyman certification. The awesome part about this level of the certification is that we are designing our own game/course out and working in guilds as we support the others in our guild through peer reviews, critical thinking, and discussion. So I guess you’d say I get to put my money where my mouth is as this is one of the things I communicate to the professors I assist with game design at New Mexico State University. Students learn best by doing and interacting with peers as they chart the course of a hero’s journey while traveling through growth, understanding, doing, and come out changed on the other side.
My quest this time is to design a gamified quest for the Subject Matter Expert (SME) who is working with an Instructional Designer (ID) as they chart their course to put a course they teach online in an interactive, memorable way. Although the journey of this gamified SME/ID course design has just begun for me I can’t wait to see where I land on the other side.
I have just finished week one of this six week course and thus far chosen my project and pondered some onboarding thoughts and a theme. I’m thinking Mission Impossible is the way to go as my experience has led me to believe most SMEs dread this process they know nothing about, they like their comfortable in class environment, and they are completely overwhelmed as they begin down this path and have people they don’t know trying to guide them to understand that effective online learning is much different that just putting their closed captioned lecture videos online!
Tune in to my project page for updates!