This was the output from the 3rd written assignment on the fantastic Coursera Gamification Course led by Kevin Werbach.
The course is a new form of teaching and learning under the banner of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that attracted over 80,000 students from 150 countries with more than 9,000 completing the course and taking the final exam. CNN did a small piece on MOOC – and yes that is me with the headphones on J
This document is my submission for the final written assignment and hopefully gives you an insight into what the course taught.
The benefit and focus for me was “How do I apply gamification techniques, in the right way, to help change the way people work”
It provided a foundation of academic rigor to the concepts that I had already started to explore and a framework for approaching these in the future. This is an example of the framework applied to the scenario:
Screnario
You are approached by Cheyenne Kendrick, the CEO of Go Digital Press (GDP), a global publisher of electronic books for devices such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad. She knows you are one of the top experts on gamification, which she has heard can revolutionize publishing. She asks you to present a proposal for a gamified system to take her business to the next level.
GDP concentrates on the trade segment of the book market, i.e. non-fiction publications that would traditionally appear in bookstores, rather than mass-market paperbacks. Approximately 50% of its titles are targeted at business professionals; 25% are educational resources on technical topics such as computer programming; and the remainder address a variety of different subjects.
As a pioneer in e-book publishing, GDP faces the challenge that many users, even in the U.S., do not yet own reader devices. As of April 2012, only 21% of American adults reported that they had read an e-book in the past year, although those numbers are increasing rapidly. Kendrick tells you that another concern is that the device manufacturers and their associated distribution platforms control the sales process, making it difficult for publishers such as GDP to obtain data or develop direct customer relationships. On the positive side, an e-book is a flexible digital asset, which can offer interactive features beyond any physical book. Kendrick asks you to propose a way to gamify the distribution or consumption of e-books, or both.
Using Issue Mapping
I have been using dialog mapping throughout the course and used a similar approach for this assignment. The challenge is to think through all of the elements of the Game Design Framework and map out the issues and challenges around each area in order to make sense of the problem. From this map I was then able to write the assignment (think real world this would form the basis for the Gamfication report/recommendations).
View the issue map to explore the thought process
Read the report/assignment below