I sincerely wish I could do something with Stephen’s comment about how the early quests are rather dry, but hey – do you remember the training quests in Lineage (attacking a dummy-scarecrow thing until you’d successfully hit it 300 times or something)? Or those early levels in WoW when you spent mind-numbing hours gathering herbs and figuring out which creatures you could and couldn’t really attack? The attentive reader of the syllabus will notice that the Quests are roughly structured around Bloom’s taxonomy, and yes – those early quests do involve a lot of “remember” and “understand” initial skills and knowledge development that a person needs to be able to complete the more difficult tasks.

I’ve pulled out references to “oral exams” and moved all assignments back into the blogs in order to keep more of the content in a written, and more easily shared, format. This should add value both for the on-campus and distance participants.

Some readers have assumed that because the course is modeled after games like WoW that the course will take place in a completely online / virtual world. Not so. The BYU credit-earning crowd will be playing significant portions of the game face-to-face, making their experience more like that of an old-skool RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. However, I’ll work with distance participants in the course to choose a common environment for them to play the game in (play by IM? play by Twitter? play in Second Life?) so that we can all find each other.

I continue to love your feedback. Many thanks for the comments you’ve left and the emails you’ve sent so far… Please keep them coming!

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures – for talking the talk but failing to walking the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field to do.

There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized so well in Gong’s description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students’ day-to-day learning experiences.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student possesses.

One need not look very far to find indications that the genre is extremely effective in promoting informal learning – see the work of Constance Steinkuehler and John Seely Brown as examples. Despite the impressive work of Constance, JSB, and others, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever designed and implemented a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. In addition to helping students gain a working knowledge of the field of open education (i.e., knowledge they can actually put to work), this course is a design experiment exploring the effectiveness of running a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game.

Visit the syllabus to learn about the four character classes, the specifics of the quests, and other information. I’m still inserting links to some of the readings, but the course structure is complete and I would love any and all feedback (including negative feedback) on the course design.

The course will be open again this year, meaning anyone, anywhere is welcome to participate. And yes, I will print and mail completion certificates again for those who earn and want them. =)