Speaker 1: Hey there, thanks for joining. Today I would like to share with you the results of a study I did for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Salt Lake Community College. I think that's what it's called. You know how academia is. We love to make up fancy names for things. And on the topic of fancy names, the name of this study is The Effects of Various Gamification Techniques on Student Engagement in Synchronous Remote Lectures. Don't worry, I'm going to explain all of that. So moving forward, let's push the right button, Lon. Here's the research question that I wanted to explore. How does the use of various gamification techniques affect student engagement in synchronous remote lectures? Think livestream or Zoom, things like that. What did I want to learn from this? Well, the aim of the study was to better understand the various or the effects of various gamification techniques on student engagement in synchronous remote lectures so that the researcher, moi, et tu, et vous, there's lots of people watching, right? Right, sure, Lon, you bet. So that we could then integrate and disseminate these best practices into our course curricula. In other words, we want to be better teachers, right? Okay, so how did this work out? All right, so let's talk about the participants in this study for a moment. In fall of 2022, I delivered a YouTube livestream course for about 15 students who were enrolled in Management 1060, that's Principles of International Business. These students had originally enrolled in the livestream class, so they knew what they were getting. They were getting a synchronous broadcast, what we called it class then. And this was all because of the pandemic. You remember all that. Everybody went to Zoom. In this case, I used YouTube livestream. Then in fall of 2023, I recruited five students to participate in an actual livestream course study, once again, in Management 1060. This time I did it over Zoom rather than YouTube, but I utilized the very same technologies and principles and aspects of gamification, resulting in the same student experience, all right? These students had originally enrolled in an online course, but then they agreed to participate in the study. So that's when they went to livestream. Okay, so what kind of data did I collect? I collected both qualitative data, post through some post-semester surveys. And then I also collected quantitative data, engagement data collected through YouTube. So we'll look at those. Before I do this though, let's explain what I mean by gamification. What did the class experience, this broadcast class experience look like for students? And to explore this better, I'm gonna get out of the way because I'm gonna show you some screen captures. Okay, so this is what the students would see. They would see a PowerPoint presentation with my little video there projected over, and live, of course. But then you notice below, I have things like awesome comments, contributors, reference past lectures, and real-world examples. Each time a student would make a comment, I would then categorize that comment in one of these areas, and I'd push a button and the number would go up. And so that way folks could kind of see how their contributions were gaining points, if you will. And then once in a while, when we would hit 10, 10 was the highest you could go in any one of these, I would do a celebratory animation with sound and so forth. So that's kind of what we mean by gamification. The idea is, you know, you're working toward a goal, you're working toward extra credit points, and there's animation and sound to kind of make it interesting, engaging, and compelling, and something you want to work toward, okay? And then of course, I have a ZoomUp picture that I could use to have more of a one-on-one conversation every once in a while. So that's another way that I would kind of bring focus back to me from the PowerPoint back and forth. You get the idea. Okay, so let's look first at our qualitative data. This was a post-semester survey that I ran with the students. Let's see how they responded. So when it came to my live stream class over YouTube, I had 15 students in that group. And when it came to the Zoom class I did the next semester or the following year, I had five students in that group. And you see here when I ask, I am X likely to comment in a live stream lecture than I am to comment in a face-to-face lecture. So what I'm getting at is how, I'm in the way again, get out of the way lawn, you dork. Okay, there we go. I'm basically asking, are you more or less likely to comment in a live stream as opposed to a lecture class? And as you can see here, the vast majority said, yeah, I'm about the same or somewhat more or even far more likely. We're going to explore that a little bit later in some depth. But you notice that in aggregate, fewer students were less likely to comment in a live stream as opposed to a face-to-face lecture. The next question is how likely are you to make a comment to try to get the gamification categories up to 10? Because remember you get extra credit if you can get those categories up to 10. Well, check this out. Students are far more likely to make comments, to ask questions, to answer questions in order to get those categories up to 10. So yes, the gamification technique of points really encourages comments, questions, answers, engagement of that sort. And then I ask these live stream lectures were X effective than face-to-face lecture? How much more effective or less effective were the live streams over face-to-face? And as you see, the majority of folks said, well, it's about the same, somewhat more or even far more effective than a face-to-face lecture. That's pretty extraordinary. I found that very encouraging. And then the question is, I feel like I can ask questions during these live stream lectures. And once again, the majority of students said about the same, somewhat agree or strongly agree with that statement. So students are very likely to ask questions in a live stream lecture. The fact that it's remote live over the internet, if you will, does not dissuade them from participating in this way. Based on these live stream lectures, I would like to take another such class. Once again, folks were in strong agreement, somewhat agree or about the same, but mostly strongly agree that they would like to take another class done in this way. So now let's take a moment and let's look at the quantitative data that I collected. Now I collected this through YouTube. So my sample size was 15. And what I basically collected was how many comments per minute. So how engaged were the students? So I get anywhere from between just over a comment a minute to sometimes a little less than one comment every two minutes. But really that's not shabby. Think about your in-class lectures, your face-to-face lectures. Are you getting a comment every minute or every two minutes? Now me, no, I'm not. But then again, maybe I suck at face-to-face lectures. Who knows? But I consider this a strong indicator of student engagement. Okay, so on that point, strong indicator of student engagement, I actually asked some of my students, why do you participate more, comment more in a live stream than you do in a lecture class? Well, there are a couple of things. Some of the students said in an in-person lecture, I don't want to interrupt. Professor is doing his or her thing and I don't want to interrupt and so forth. Whereas in a live stream, they can comment on anything at any time. It's just part of the ongoing dialogue. These are students who watch Twitch and so forth and comment on Twitch and other live forums. And so you don't have to worry about interrupting. So another thing is in an in-person lecture, some students don't want to call attention to themselves by raising their hand or speaking out and so forth. Whereas in a live stream, you can go ahead and comment and it doesn't cause the whole class to turn around and look at you and so forth. You can be pretty unobtrusive and to a certain degree, anonymous when you're just making a comment. So students are more likely to comment because of that as well. Okay, so now those are the results of my study. But what I want to do is share with you changes that I have made to my live stream classes based on the study that I did and the results of those changes, all right? Because heck, why are you doing a study if you're not looking for ways to improve? So I'm going to get out of the, well, no, I can stay here. So I've changed things up here a bit, right? So yeah, let's get out of the way. As you see, I no longer have categories for the comments. One of the things I found is that because comments were in categories, it kind of constrained what students would say and how they would say it and so forth. In other words, they were a little fixated on trying to make their comment fit a category. And so now what I do is I just simply have these light bulbs at the bottom of the screen. I'll show you a sample here later on that whenever I get a comment that I like or a question or an answer and so forth, I turn on a little light bulb. And then when the light bulbs hit these certain marks, I have this cool animation that comes up. I actually have many animations. Whereas in the past, I just had one or two, this time I have copious animations that kind of celebrate each milestone that the student hits. And then of course you see I've included a green screen that allows me to talk over the slides. So this way I'm on screen, the main data is on screen for the PowerPoints and we still have the light bulbs in place and so forth. So this way students can engage with me a little bit better in a more high techie way than we had in the past. Now, this has had an effect. Look at the comments per minute. Now, in the past, I was measuring comments per minute with a sample size of 15. In this new style, my sample size is only 13. So my sample size, the number of students participating is fewer, is smaller. And yet look at the comments per minute. They have gone in some cases way up, in all cases they have gone up. So even with fewer students, I get more comments. I know I could have normalized this if I were into statistics and so forth and it would have been a more profound image, but I'm not a statistician, I didn't wanna do that. So the point is though, these changes that I'm making are having the desired effect of increased engagement and participation in my online classes. So there you go. I hope you found some of this interesting, insightful, informative. I strongly encourage you to try some of these things in your own online lectures. It doesn't have to be as fancy as what I've done. I kind of go overboard, but really, truly with basic tech and basic use of the tech, you can actually do some pretty awesome things. And if you stick around at Nutshell Studio Productions, this channel, I'll show you how to do some of these things. All right, and that's it. Now, I told you what I would do is I'd show you kind of how I do some of this stuff. Yeah, that's a fancy green screen. Slam. Yeah, so let me show you some of the animations. These are just things, you're over here now. Sorry, we've got two cameras. Just things that kind of celebrate when students do fun things, do cool things. I kind of like this. They're fun. For me, I've got a whole bunch of kind of old school movie ones here, but on other decks and so forth, I have some superhero ones. So every once in a while, we can get Spider-Man coming in. Kind of fun. ♪ Spider-Man, Spider-Man. ♪ So there you go. Just thought I'd show you some of that stuff real quick. All right, we're done. We'll see you later. Thanks for joining. And until we talk again, have a fantastic day.