When Giving Learning Control, Know Your Learners

In Gamification and other learning situations, encourage the learner to make meaningful and consequential choices within clearly defined rules and a safe environment.

How much learner control to provide depends on the experience of the learner.

Gamification that provides the learnerwith the opportunity to decide whether to bypass some lesson elements and control the sequence at which they receive content is considered high in learner control. In contrast, when a course and lesson offers few options to the learner, which is considered to be program control (Clark & Mayer, 2011). Content sequencing, pacing and access to learner support are forms of control that can be more or less in the hands of the learner depending on the design of the instruction.

Allow learner Minimal Control

In some cases, it is appropriate to allow the learner to have minimal control over the gamification elements. For example limiting the number of attempts on a trivia-type question or only giving one opportunity to guess the solution to a mystery. Minimal learner control is best when working with students who are new or novice to a topic. It is also important when the amount of content to be covered could be overwhelming and it makes sense to provide the learner with a little bit of content at a time (Clark & Mayer, 2011).

The idea of allowing minimal control works in both structural and content gamification. In structural gamification for example, the design may be such that the learner must progress through content in a linear fashion to obtain the most amount of points or to be able to answer questions which appear periodically within the gamified instruction.
In content gamification, additional content and information may be revealed after the learner has hit a certain milestone within the instruction such as uncovering a clue about a historical event or discovering a message related to solving an algebra problem. Providing instruction in a prescribed format with limited learner control can be appropriate for content that requires a prescribed sequence to be learned as well as content that needs to be memorized.

Allow Student Maximum Control

The more experienced a learner is with the subject matter, the more control you should allow them in the pacing, sequencing and access to assistance with gamification (Clark & Mayer, 2011).

Allowing more learner control within gamification is most likely to be successful when the learners have prior knowledge of the content and skills involved, the subject is a more advanced lesson in a course or more advanced course in a curriculum, learners have a high level of metacognitive skills and the course is of low complexity (Clark & Mayer, 2011).

Allowing learners, as described above, to have more control in gamification applies to both structural and content gamification. In structural gamification, an experienced learner could decide to answer trivia-type questions to earn points first rather than being forced to go through content before being allowed access to the question. The experienced learner may decide to go after content with the highest point values and ignore content with lower point values. Something similar happened recently with a Jeopardy player. (Read about his strategy here.)

In content gamification, providing a learner with control means he or she can approach a challenge, mystery or even a role as a character with some degree of freedom. The learner can choose how he or she wants to approach the content and determine the sequence in which to proceed.

Reference

Clark, R. C. & Mayer, R. E. (2011) E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. New York: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.

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