A few weeks ago I made a post in my Facebook group, The Online Educator, about this fun Discussion Board assignment developed by David Noffs and Jacob Guerra-Martinez who are learning designers at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies, and I thought it was definitely worth writing a blog post about it.
I came across a great post from The Teaching Professor entitled, "How Superheroes Can Bring Your Online Discussion Board to Life". The instructors created a gamified discussion board called Discussion Hero where students adopted either hero or villain roles and earned points for their posts based on their performance within their assumed role.
This assignment seems like a lot of fun. Students get to pick an avatar of their superhero to make it more real. The assignment includes a Discussion Hero rubric and scoring spreadsheet. This allows students to compete with one another to reach a higher status on the leaderboard, fostering motivation and engagement.
My favorite part is the sample of the students' posts and responses they included from the course. It's really nice to see the way it played out.
An assignment like this has the potential to really stimulate and excite learners. It also helps students to think about concepts in different ways and from different points of views.
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I am a nurse and a college educator. I help other motivated educators leverage the tools needed to teach online successfully so that they can create lively, engaging, quality courses from the comfort of their homes!
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