Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

As I said a few days ago, I have now returned from the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials). My presentation was well-received by most of the audience, and I later got very valuable feedback from researchers in different fields.

The conference once started as a small gathering of researchers, mostly related to the field of Medicine. However, for the last 13 editions (yes! 13!) it has grown into a much bigger event, with high impact work and reputable presenters (and then me ). The organizers also treated me wonderfully, with a big display of effort and hospitality.

All in all, my visit to Mexico was a pleasure and I really hope I will be able to come back.

Some people asked for the slides of my presentation during the conference, so I have just uploaded them to SlideShare for anyone who wants to check them. You can find them here.

Research conferences, e-learning, educational games, travelling

2009 has started strongly for us, at least in terms of mediatic impact. We started the year with a radio interview with our colleagues from UNED, which was aired on national radio very early in the morning of January 7th 2009. We spoke about the benefits of games in education and outlined our main ideas about how to use games properly in education.

Download radio interview (in Spanish)

More or less at the same time, we were contacted by the Science News Service from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. They had seen our paper about Educational Game Design in the Journal Computers in Human Behavior and wanted to prepare a short piece about games in education. A bit later, they decided that they wanted to complement it with a short video interview.

Video Interview (in Spanish)

News piece about e-Adventure (in Spanish)

Translated version (in English)

I guess that this amount of media attention means that these ideas are catching on. This cannot translate into a feeling of “we did it!”. The current and short-term research is critical for the success of educational games. As Dr. Van Eck put it, now everyone is paying attention to educational gaming. We must live up to those expectations now or fail forever.

Research e-learning, game design, media

The article we wrote in cooperation between the <e-UCM> research group and the Educational Technology Expertise Center from the Open University of the Netherlands has finally been published in the latest volume of Simulation & Gaming.

The article describes the integration of the <e-Adventure> platform with IMS Learning Design environments, implemented over the CopperCore platform.

This is the complete reference:

Daniel Burgos, Pablo Moreno-Ger, José Luis Sierra, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Marcus Specht, Rob Koper: Building Adaptive Game-Based Learning Resources: The Marriage of IMS Learning Design and . Simulation & Gaming 39, pp. 414-431. 2008

As usual, the final draft is available for download at the <e-UCM> website.

<e-Adventure> articles, e-learning, educational games

In the last few years, the concept of the “Learning Objects Model” has been a keystone in the discussion of web-based learning (and even learning in general). The model suggests that content can be composed as small self-contained units that can then be contained. The perspective is very interesting: If every piece of educational content is created in a self-contained and reusable way, it would be possible to create huge courses simply combining these objects as LEGO bricks.

The model will only work if these pieces of content can be easily identified (in a repository, for example) and can be deployed together in, say, a Learning Managament System. For this reason, there have been huge efforts in the direction of standardizing these procedures. The IMS Content Packaging specification defines how we should distribute these Learning Objects so that they can be deployed in different platforms without an adaptation effort. When it comes to “discovering” these Learning Objects in a repository, we need standardized metadata (like IEEE LOM or DublinCore) that allows us to search in these repositories and quickly decide if the LO is suitable for our needs. Some higher-level initiatives combine different standards and propose a generic model for the deployment of online materials (ADL SCORM would be the most relevant example).

The model, as most things, has faithful believers and angry opponents. Personally, I haven’t decided yet. I do believe that the idea of resuing educational content is good (it sort of works in programming) but tend to reject the concept of standardized content. Without standard students, standard content seems like a bad idea. This is one of the reasons why I think game-based learning is good and adaptive game-based learning is great.

However, I also believe that the current e-learning infrastructure can be leveraged as a deployment method. E-Learning parcipants (developers, instructors and students) are more open to new ideas than the traditional school participants. Besides, most schools and universities are shifting towards a blended learning (b-learning) approach that combines traditional classes with e-learning technologies. A teacher from an online training environment, a school or a university can use an e-learning platform to send the games to the students so that they can play with them at home.

Putting both ideas together, my idea was that we could encapsulate the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects so that they can deployed by a teacher in (mostly) any Learning Management System and played by the students at home. Additionally, if the games are labelled with standardized metadata, they can be stored and discovered in content repositories, which seems like a good a idea in itself.

We are trying to support and test this idea with the <e-Adventure> platform. Thanks to the programming talent displayed by Javier Torrente, from version 0.3 <e-Adventure> supports tagging the games with IEEE LOM metadata and then exporting them as IMS packages. We will soon be publishing a detailed report on our experiences, which include successful deployment of the games in platforms such as WebCT and Moodle, and easy inclusion of the games in bigger modules using the Reload Editor.

In the meantime, why don’t you try for yourself? Download the new version, export your game as a Learning Object and try to deploy it in your LMS of choice. We will be waiting for your kind feedback.

Research e-learning, educational games

Aww, crap, I did it again… Once more I have managed to neglect my blog for more than two months. Quite a feat, indeed.

For the comeback, I will be completing the post that I left uncompleted about four months ago. In the post Integrating games and e-learning (pt. 1) I discussed Aldrich’s six stages for new technologies and ideas, concluding that educational videogames were slowly entering a critical phase where public awareness and the expectations generated by the media put a pressure on any future game-based learning initiative.

As I stated in that post, the value of games as an educational tool is barely disputed in the academic field. The debate has moved on to discuss if they are cost-effective (is there a real ROI if you spend a million dollars in an educational product?) and how we can introduce educational videogames and game-like simulations in the current educational system without disconnecting them from the rest of the curriculum. The post ended with the open question of how to overcome those issues, which is the topic of my thesis.

I would like to focus this discussion on the second issue, the integration of the games with the rest of the educational process. A typical target for educational gaming is K-12 education. Often this is because we consider that only children play games. This is an idea that I strongly dispute, but that’s not the point of this post. Taking a step back from the concept of regulated schools, other environments may be willing to use game-based learning approaches. In particular, the e-learning arena is currently evolving to meet the challenge of improving the quality of the learning experiences and compensating the consequences of the separation from the instructor (e.g. lack of motivation, the inability to detect students that require additional support, etc.). This has caused e-learning technologies to move beyond the concept of mere static-content repositories, becoming complex environments that manage learning experiences, allowing the interaction between instructors and students, giving the instructor the ability to monitor student progress, and offering complex interaction mechanisms that improve the learning experiences: They are the so-called Learning Management Systems (LMS).

The field is ripe for the introduction of game-based learning. LMS vendors are constantly reinventing the concept trying to explore new alternatives that may give them a competitive advantage. In addition, focusing our efforts on the introduction of educational videogames in these environments allows us to leverage the existing technological infrastructure and facilitates the the integration of the games with the rest of activities in the instructional design.

Additionally, even though these e-learning systems were born as an alternative to traditional (schooled) learning, they are currently being used to enrich and complement those traditional models in what has been branded the b-learning approach (as in blended learning). I consider that the integration with modern e-learning environments can be a base on which to build an educational model that combines all the elements previously identified: The role of the instructor, the importance of rich instructional designs, the use of traditional contents, and leveraging the benefits of educational videogames. Additionally, given the current trend towards the adoption of b-learning approaches, the benefits can have an impact on both online learning environments and traditional environments willing to embrace blended approaches.

In the development of the <e-Adventure> platform, we always had LMS platforms in mind. The engine can be deployed as a Java Applet through any web system, just like any other kind of web content. The problem is, if we simply do that, we only get the advantages of any other kind of web content. Games can be dynamically adapted, they can generate traces of the activity of the student and even perform automatic assessment. Those are all desirable features in online learning, and all that we need is to connect the games with the LMS (and thus with the rest of the learning experience). That’s the reason why the <e-Adventure> platform includes an API that enables the communication between <e-Adventure> games and LMS platforms, as well as a reference implementation of the API on both the client and the server sides.

When the games are deployed through a compliant LMS (in our current state, that means an LMS that follows the IMS Learning Design specification), they establish a communication link through this API, and use this channel to exchange adaptation and assessment information with the LMS.

We are only beginning to explore the possibilities of this integration and the learning patterns that emerge. For more information about this integration and its educational possibilities, I recommed reading our paper Adaptive Units of Learning and Educational Videogames, recently published in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

Research e-learning, educational games

The pressure of completing my thesis in time made me miss the self-imposed weekly deadline to write here that I was proudly accomplishing until this weekend. As a quick fix, here’s an excerpt of the motivation of my research, stolen from the introduction to my thesis.

In his book Learning by Doing, Aldrich states that every new technology undergoes a 6-stage cycle from its inception until it becomes a established feature of our daily lives. The cycle starts at the Theory stage, when the academic world starts discussing an idea that may suppose a change or an advancement. When innovators start pushing the first pilots, the idea becomes an Innovation.

If these first developments are successful and show potential, the expectation grows and both marketing divisions and the media start making promises about the future of the technology. Then, institutions and corporations assume this may be the “next big thing”: it’s the Magic Bullet stage and, driven by the hype, vast amounts of money and resources are invested in exploring further. But as more solutions are tested, the results do not always live up to the expectations. The idea suddenly does not look so interesting and the Confusion stage starts.

The next step, which Aldrich names Strategic Advantage is the second, more refined implementation the idea, tackling the issues that generated the previous crisis and providing real value to adopters. After that stage, the new technology eventually becomes Infrastructure.

The idea of using games or videogames as learning tools has been around for some time. It’s origins trace back to seminal works by Malone on the 80s and the major contributions by Leutner, Porter, Lepper, Cordova, Rieber and many many others.

In the last few years, the exponential increase in the technology and complexity of modern videogames has turned them into one of the biggest entertainment industries. Meanwhile, the idea of using games for education has gained momentum in these first years of the 21st Century. New scholars (Prensky, Garris, Gee, Squire, Jekins…) have pushed the idea and successfully argued that videogames contain precisely the elements required to improve the learning experiences in order to match the requirements of the Information Society. The work of these authors has finally made an impact and, in the last 5 years, the use of videogames and game-like simulations in educational environments has moved on from the academic Theory stage towards the Innovation stage with the development of several initiatives and pilots. And then quoting Van Eck in 2006:

After years of research and proselytizing, the proponents of digital game-based learning (DGBL) have been caught unaware. Like the person who is still yelling after the sudden cessation of loud music at a party, DGBL proponents have been shouting to be heard above the prejudice against games. But now, unexpectedly, we have everyone’s attention.

This sudden attention marks the transition to the Magic Bullet stage which often leads to the corresponding Confusion stage. That critical stage has already started. Even though the initial pilots hint a great potential and learning benefits, it has not been possible to quantify such benefits precisely and this lack of evidence, bringing back the images of the principle and fueling a new critical debate.

The academic debate has thus moved on to new grounds. One of the key questions now is, assuming that videogames provide a quality learning experience, is this experience significant enough so as to justify its enormous cost when compared to traditional contents? This question, by now, lacks a broadly accepted answer.

Another critique often heard is that merely interacting with an educational game does not guarantee that the student learns the lessons, and that games should be a part of more bigger educational models. How can we introduce educational videogames and game-like simulations in the current educational system without disconnecting them from the rest of the curriculum? Changes in the educational system are always introduced with caution. Given the stakes, it is not feasible to overhaul the educational system due to unaffordable costs and a lack of absolute guarantees of a risk-free transition.

Therefore, if the idea is to become a common element in our learning experiences, we need ways to overcome the current Confusion stage and refine the successful elements of the current approaches, eliminate the bad approaches and eventually move on to the Strategic Advantage stage.

How can we achieve this? Some suggestions next week…

Research e-learning, educational games

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I am again enjoying a research fellowship at the MGH / HMS Lab of Computer Science in Boston. Even though I am involved in a number of projects here, the main objective of the stay is to integrate the <e-Adventure> engine with the .LRN online learning environment that recently announced support for the IMS LD specification.

What does integration mean here? The idea is that <e-Adventure> games can be embedded in an IMSLD Unit of Learning and launched in the student’s computer from the .LRN platform. <e-Adventure> includes built-in mechanisms for assessment and adaptive learning, and these systems are connected to the Unit of Learning.

What does connected mean here? It means that the events that happen during the execution of the UoL before launching the game will affect the behavior of the game (tapping into the adaptation mechanism) and that whatever happens inside the game is logged by the assessment mechanism and reported to the .LRN environment in order to affect the execution of the UoL after the game.

The objective is thus to replicate and enhance the work I did at the Open University of the Netherlands a few months ago, although this time we will be paying special attention to making a general purpose solution. This means that the integration will be designed in such a way that the <e-Adventure> side should work with any IMSLD compliant system and that the .LRN side should work with any game that follows the public APIs that I’m developing here.

Moreover, in order to demonstrate all this, we will be developing at least two games during my stay. One should be an adventure game implemented with <e-Adventure> and the other a small game developed from scratch that uses the APIs to communicate with .LRN. Both games will be included in a couple of Units of Learning that will also contain “traditional” content. Unfortunately, we still haven’t found an appropriate topic for the games/UoLs. Fortunately, you are reading this and maybe you have suggestion.

Additionally, I’m taking advantage of the fact that I’m staying in Boston and going to a lot of talks, conferences and events, where I’m meeting a lot of very interesting people. I’m glad to say that <e-Adventure> seems to be gathering a nice amount of interest, which has finally driven me to update the project’s website. New samples, revised texts and… Yes! We have finally published a fully-functional version of the engine for download!

Mind you, it is not a release, just a stable snapshot of the codebase, compiled as a jar file and offered for download. It is an uncompleted and unsupported download. The official beta release of the <e-Adventure> engine is scheduled for July 2007.

Enjoy!

<e-Adventure> e-learning, educational games, projects, travelling

As promised, this post is written from the Netherlands. I am working at the Educational Technology Expertise Center in the Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen.

I’m doing a reseach stay with Daniel Burgos in the Development Program, directed by Prof. Rob Koper. We’re working in the integration of the <e-Game> engine with the CopperCore IMS Learning Design player. In a fancy setup, we’re trying to get SLED to launch in the student’s computer a small adventure game as one of the activities from a Unit of Learning. After launched, the game should be adapted to whatever happened in the previous stages of the unit (namely, the previous knowledge of the learner) and when the game finishes, it should report the outcomes of the game to the CopperCore engine so that the rest of the UoL is in turn affected by the outcome. Technologically, lots of SOAP, lots of Java and the wonderful design of the CooperCore Service Integration layer.

Hungry readers will already be wondering: Wassup with the chocolate? It’s coming. From two sides, actually. First a picture, so you get the proper frame of mind:

First, on our proof-of-concept Unit of Learning for the work at OUNL. Provisional title: The Art and Craft of Chocolate. After some initial tests on learner knowledge, we launch this adventure game in which the player is responsible for Paniel, a young student at Le Cordon Bleu learning advanced techniques dealing with chocolate. Sweet sauces, bitter sauces, salty sauces, combinations of chocolate with exotic materials, etc. Nice theme, huh? The player is required to do some research and then prepare a variety of sauces with different styles. Once the player is satiasfied with his arsenal, he can move on to the final test: A practial exam in a restaurant with real customers. The customers have different tastes and Paniel has to infer which of his sauces will satisfy better each client and with what dish they should be served. After the exam, the Unit of Learning continues. More information on that project should be available around Christmas.

Then, I wanted to report my experience this weekend in Cologne. In addition to a nice (but dark and spooky) cathedral, Cologne hosts the Museum of Chocolate, with detailed descriptions of the history and the process of chocolate, a fountain of chocolate that you can actually taste, a tropical garden and a long etc. The pic is actually from the visit to the museum… unfortunately, there was a wall of glass keeping me away from all that melted chocolate.

Obviously I was required to go there as part of my field research (ahem), and I ended up finding game-based learning hidden in a corner. What happens to be relevant was a touchscreen that was going mostly unnoticed but actually included a number of mini-games trying to put some points across. The most interesting one was actually a trading game on the (shameful) history of chocolate. Get some brass, some lanterns, some weapons and a bit of silver in europe and set sail to Africa. Sell some brass there and load the ship with slaves. Set sail to america, sell the slaves and load cocoa beans. Back to europe and some accounting: you spent some 6.000 silver coins and earned some 50.000. Point taken.

A nice way to express a crude reality without hiding it. Very sincere and illustrative. There were also some other minigames on the production, identification of trading vessels and cocoa beans. It is a pity that the machine was going unnoticed and was hidden in a corner. Hopefully, it is actually a good tool when you’re in the guided tour, but visiting on your own it goes rather unnoticed. We’re on the way, but still far from there.

Pics from Cologne and the museum coming when I get up to date with the thousands of photos pending publication.

Research e-learning, educational games, travelling