IDS Faculty Wins Provost’s Digital Learning Fellowship
Northwestern learning designer and faculty member in the School of Professional Studies’ MS in Information Design and Strategy (IDS) program David Noffs has received one of ten Digital Learning Fellowships from the Office of the Provost. The competitive fellowship, awarded for “innovative faculty projects,” will allow professor Noffs and fellow learning designer Jacob Guerra-Martinez to pilot Discussion Hero, a program that gamifies discussion forums in online classes.
In applying for the fellowship, Noffs used his extensive academic and professional research in online learning design to liven up his proposal, mirroring many of the concepts he and Martinez are working to bring to the online classroom. Noffs explained, “I tried to break out of the formal nature of a fellowship application and make our proposal fun and game-like. I changed the formatting and kept it simple so that reviewers could understand exactly what we are trying to do. I think there’s potential for some real magic with this project.”
Discussion Hero is designed to bring friendly competition to classroom discussion boards, ideally improving the quality of individual posts. Imagine a gamified participation rubric that awards students points based on overall progress and individual posts. Two progress bars, a hero bar and villain bar, track overall discussion points and the average scores of each post, respectively.
“The idea is to have students be aware of the fact that it’s a friendly competition, but also to leverage the spirit of competition for engagement,” said Noffs. “Part of the premise of a learning environment is creating a community where you can experiment and have students see the game as part of the learning process itself rather than an assessment of their own talents.”
The Digital Learning Fellowship will support the work of Noffs and Martinez through a 14-month project timeline in which the team will launch Discussion Hero in Noffs’s IDS classes with graduate students. The first class to test out a prototype of the app is currently in session. Noffs and Martinez will then improve the app based on student feedback and introduce it to other instructors for the fall 2018 and winter 2019 quarters.
Noffs and Martinez were previously part of Northwestern’s Educational Technology Teaching Fellows and presented at the Online Learning Consortium in New Orleans last year.
Northwestern’s IDS program serves as the ideal launch point for the project. Noffs noted that students in the program bring in professional experience and real-world examples that apply to the coursework. That is to say, many of the students in the program are developing learning materials themselves, so they’ll have valuable insights on the effectiveness and user experience of Discussion Hero.
Noffs, who possesses a Doctor of Education with a dissertation in online learning communities, worked as an instructional specialist and faculty member at Columbia College Chicago before transitioning to Northwestern. With his expertise in instructional technology, he helped develop the IDS program and fell in love with the high standards, faculty collaboration, and forward-thinking curriculum of the University.
“I hope students fall in love with the same things about the IDS program I did when I first heard about it,” said Noffs. “It’s unique for a graduate program. It takes a meta-view of a dynamic field and embraces the theory and foundational thinking of how we design and deliver information.”