Our interim UL came into my office last week and said that while the individual colleges on campus would only ever impact the lives of their respective students, the university library has the opportunity to impact each and every of our 38,000 students. So – we should explore gamifying library research skills, he said, to get students excited about competing for points by completing tutorials, thus taking advantage of our potential.
I’ve been thinking about badges at our library ever since I interviewed and a then-future colleague asked what I thought about gamifying curriculum and badges. Now that I’m here, and I’m creeping toward the end of my first year, I’ve started creating videos and tutorials and have been contemplating not only organization, but hosting and presenting these learning assets to the campus community.
I think that framing the tutorials I create as “badges” to be earned might be a great way to help with clarity. And to serve as motivation for students. AND to make it easy for faculty and librarians alike to assign tutorials – just tell students to complete the Evaluator badge, or the Organizer badge.
I’m still gathering my thoughts on what would work best here. There are a lot of options for implementing a badging system, and I want to consider what would have the most visibility (and accessibility) but also offer the least in development work, as far as coding and hosting goes.
Photo Credit: See-ming Lee, Flickr