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Full-Text Articles in Education
“Are These People Real?”: Designing And Playtesting An Alternative Reality, Educational Simulation, Jason K. Mcdonald, Jonathan Balzotti, Melissa Franklin, Jessica Haws, Jamin Rowan
“Are These People Real?”: Designing And Playtesting An Alternative Reality, Educational Simulation, Jason K. Mcdonald, Jonathan Balzotti, Melissa Franklin, Jessica Haws, Jamin Rowan
Faculty Publications
In this design case, we report our design and playtest of a form of alternative reality, educational simulation that we call a playable case study (PCS). One of the features that make our simulations unique is how they are designed to implement a principle called This Is Not a Game, or TINAG, meaning that the affordances we design into the simulation suggest to students that the experience they are having is real, in contrast to the way the artificial nature of the experience is highlighted in many computer games. In this case, we describe some challenges we encountered in designing …
Increase Student Engagement In Online Writing Environments, Jonathan Balzotti, Jason K. Mcdonald, Kevin Haws, Amy Allen Rogers, Matthew J. Baker
Increase Student Engagement In Online Writing Environments, Jonathan Balzotti, Jason K. Mcdonald, Kevin Haws, Amy Allen Rogers, Matthew J. Baker
Faculty Publications
This case study explores a type of educational simulation, an alternative reality game we call a playable case study (PCS), and how its use influenced student engagement in an online writing classroom. The goal of the simulation was to help students create professional communication artifacts and experience real-world professional communication situations. This article reports the effectiveness of the playable case study as a tool specifically for online writing instruction (OWI). The context of our research was a PCS called Microcore. Acting as interns for a company, students are asked to investigate a serious problem that occurs and present a solution …
Considering What Faculty Value When Working With Instructional Designers And Instructional Design Teams, Jason K. Mcdonald, Salma Elsayed-Ali, Kayla Bowman, Amy Allen Rogers
Considering What Faculty Value When Working With Instructional Designers And Instructional Design Teams, Jason K. Mcdonald, Salma Elsayed-Ali, Kayla Bowman, Amy Allen Rogers
Faculty Publications
The purpose of this research was to study what university faculty valued when working with instructional designers and instructional design teams to develop educational simulations. We did this through a case study of three faculty, where we analyzed what they discussed among themselves or communicated to other team members about what mattered to them about their team relationships or the design processes they employed. We structured our case report around three thematic issues that expressed how our participants depicted good relationships and processes. Our report concludes with a discussion of how instructional designers could use our findings in their practice.