Online discussion boards have been used since 1979, and while foundational to asynchronous interaction among students and teachers, they can be tedious and predictable, even when instructors design carefully worded prompts. Students tend to agree with each other in class discussions even if they do not feel the same way. Many faculty have shared with their learning designers how they wish students would engage with each other in a more dynamic exchange of ideas. As a result, Northwestern learning designers Jacob Guerra-Martinez and David Noffs explored various ways to gamify discussion boards to do just that. The result was Discussion Hero, a gamified discussion board that places student participants into Hero or Villain roles and brings debate-style interaction to Canvas discussions. During this interactive session, Guerra-Martinez and Noffs will describe the evolution of Discussion Hero from an idea explored during a year-long Educational Technology Teaching Fellowship and developed over the past year as part of the Provost’s Digital Learning Fellowship. As part of the presentation, the two learning designers will demonstrate how Discussion Hero works, present research data from three pilot programs over the last year, and host an interactive discussion about how participants may explore gamification in their own courses.
