Gamification stuff we love: Stanford Crowd Course Initiative

Gamification stuff we love: Stanford Crowd Course Initiative

In the world  of education gamification is inspiring a number of new initiatives and one worth noting is the Stanford Crowd Course Initiative. Stanford university is looking for experts, teachers and educators to assist them in developing crowd sourced content for their courses. The application process is relatively simple, you fill out a form explaining your skills and expertise, you give an indication of how much time you could dedicate to working on the course materials and then your ability to work youtube or other social channels.

The courses they would like to co-create range from data science to programming all the way to presentation skills. It is the first initiative of this kind I have seen coming from a major university and this may well be what the MOOC world needed to get away from dreadfully boring lectures based videos and hopefully more animated individuals talking about their experience with passion and experience from the real world.

The course pages then give you the names of all the people on the team who worked on them, how long it took them to build the course and a request for (constructive) feedback. I personally think this is refreshing to see it happen and also for it to come from a well recognised university. In brackets behind the individual’s name you also find a number and here is their explanation “(# of “thank you” received*)  and * = # of “thank you” represents the number of acknowledgement each person received from another, during the duration of course creation. Though not completely representative of one’s effort, it gives a general idea of everyone’s contribution level. Top 3 highlighted.”

It’s a nice way of indicating peer-to-peer appreciation and contribution whilst encouraging further co-creation efforts.

What have you seen in the education world that has some gamification interest in it recently?