CityU Teacher Creating Gamified Learning Environment with KEEP

City University of Hong Kong and KEEP (Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform) co-organized a seminar on 13 November 2015 at the University’s Kowloon Tong Campus to exchange ideas on the online education platform and learning through gamification.

KEEP Project by Prof. Irwin King and KEEP team

The seminar began with the introduction to the KEEP innovative applications. Professor Irwin King, the Principal Investigator of KEEP Project, highlighted the importance of applying online education resources in tertiary education. With this vision, the KEEP team created the e-learning applications for educators to design their own courses with all demonstrating and assessing elements. The designed courses can be promoted globally by the KEEP platform. The course-creating procedures were demonstrated by the KEEP team with the four major functional modules of KEEP, namely KEEPSearch, KEEPCourse, KEEPCatalog and KEEPoll and also edore, the co-branding partner of KEEP. Going forward, the KEEP team will provide users with more advanced technology and products in the fields of analytics, gaming, social networks and mobile technology.

E-Learning courses through gamification by Dr. Ron Kwok

Dr. Ron Kwok of City University of Hong Kong showcased the project on gamification in the courses of Business innovation and Chinese Civilization. The project is aimed at fostering students’ creativity and encouraging their engagement in course activities by a RECIPE approach, which is a player-based and non-reward-based strategy to induce intrinsic learning motivation. It is hoped that the root courses offered by the City University of Hong Kong can be transformed into MOOC courses and they will involve gamification in the coming future.

Summary of the Q & A Session

The audience showed their interest in KEEP at the end of the seminar by asking the speakers a couple of questions and Professor King has replied to the audiences’ questions as shown below:

Q1: Does the KEEP platform support courses delivered in Chinese?
A: Moodle and Open edX support courses in any language.

Q2: Is it possible to upload the videos to YouTube directly?
A: Yes. However, people in China cannot get access to YouTube. The KEEP team will help solve the problem for Moodle and Open edX courses. The best thing for YouTube is that it embeds all languages in captions.

Q3: Apart from textual elements, what is the difference between a course and a game? Would there be any support like graphic designs and other visual elements for gamification of courses to attract young people?
A: We are trying to apply the gamification engine called PaGamO in Taiwan. It is similar to the game called Risk, which is a territorial-fighting game. In a game, you answer questions to make your territory larger and you can also defend your territory by creating questions. So, this can encourage students to create questions so that people would answer them and then people can rate their questions. You will get points if people rate your questions as very interesting or tough to solve. We hope to have a collection of best practices in educational gaming as advised by teachers and educators.

Q4: How does KEEP verify a student’s identity?
A:  KEEP can verify the identity of a student by his/her university email account.

Q5: How many online courses is KEEP planning to establish by the end of the three-year period?
A: We want to create as many courses as we can. But KEEP is not a content provider, so what we are doing is to provide the infrastructure of a site which facilitates e-learning.

Q6: Do you think the Quality Assurance party in the University would approve the project?
A: Yes, We are looking for the possibilities of moving to the path of allowing university students to take some online credit-bearing courses because in China, some of the major universities have already been doing that.