This presentation describes our work in progress about how to include serious games as edX activities. The final idea is to simplify the inclusion of serious games as exercises in edX MOOCs. We are considering how to automatize the inclusion of eAdventure games into edX.

1. Serious Games
as edX MOOC Activities
Manuel Freire, Ángel del Blanco, Baltasar
Fernández-Manjón
balta@fdi.ucm.es ; @baltaFM
http://www.slideshare.net/BaltasarFernandezManjon

2. Outline
• Goal: Serious Game integration into MOOC
• Motivation:
– best of both worlds
• MOOC: huge potential audience,
motivation & analytics present problems
• SG: adds motivation, improved analytics
(if we can manage the data influx)
– both are growing. Can they complement each other?
– more users => significant research
• Outcomes:
– proof-of-concept
– map of integration strategies

3. Why focus on edX?
– Popular
(big 3: Coursera, edX, Udacity)
– Open-source
(easier to develop, welcoming GitHub community)
– Growth perspective
MOOC.org: google partnership, "1st half of 2014"
– Rich activities
molecule editor, foldit integration, circuit editor,
LON-CAPA support...

4. why use eAdventure?
sec. education healthcare accessibility language training

5. Rich activities
edX eAdventure
Author ad-hoc XML within edX Studio eAdventure Editor
Run XModule / XBlock eAdventure Engine
Analyze
basic completion reports +
ad-hoc +
Analytics ???
Gleaner (game analytics)

6. Modular activities in edX:
great expectations
• The activity itself
– XModules (old)
– XBlocks (new; WIP; standardized environment)
• Analysis of the activities' results
– Ad-hoc reporting + basic completion (old)
– Insights (new; very much WIP)
(we expected both projects to be further along by now...)

7. A happy XBlock
• Runtimes (auth., LMS, appengine) provide
– storage (=state)
– url-mapping (=location, callback support)
– analytics
• each XBlock provides
– views
(returns HTML fragments; may include authoring view)
– handlers (typically AJAX)
– structure (hierarchy of children)

8. Integration: runtime & reporting
• eAdventure "assessment profile":
generated feedback
• Minimal integration:
report back global outcomes
• Multi-level integration:
each section reports as a
"different" activity
• Low-level integration:
report back everything

9. Authoring integration in edX Studio

10. Authoring reporting in eAdventure
The assessment profile panel. For the selected assessment rule, (a)
is a condition over the game state that triggers the rule, while (b) is
the information included in the assessment report, and (c) are the
pair attribute-values to be sent to the LMS-MOOC.

11. Collecting game LAs from MOOCs
• Thousands of concurrent users = lots of data
– Redundancy: keep local copy, keep trying to send
updates until ack (w/ exponential backoff)
– Depth: send most important data first
– Server-side: write-optimized databases highly
recommended (Cassandra, Mongo, ...)
• Not yet tested in proof-of-concept
• One of the most promising aspects

12. Conclussion
• Definitely possible to integrate SGs into
MOOCs
• edX is still a moving target
– Very active development
– Docs < Mailing-list
• Other paths available
– LTI wrapper

13. Gamification
• Award "completion badges" for in-game
activities
• Complementary to traditional educational
objectives
• Self-assessment, status
... but not just for games
Popular in games ...

14. Future work
• Exploring all the possibilities of LON-CAPA
• Advance beyond proof-of-concept
– Create a self-contained XBlock
(at multi-level integration)
– Test it in an open edX MOOC
– Add edX-activity deployment to eAdventure 2.0
• Test
– Reporting with thousands of simultaneous users
– Game evolution based on LA results
– Peer-to-peer game-trace grading?

15. Questions / Comments?