TSL First Fridays: Dr. Naoko Ozaki on Gamifying Online Courses

Speaker: Dr. Naoko Ozaki, Lecturer, Center for Languages & Intercultural Communication

This monthly event is part of a Teaching and Scholarly Learning series that will feature instructor successes and will be a place for anyone who is teaching to ask questions, give feedback, share success stories, and get advice. 

Date: December 4, 2020

Summary: Dr. Ozaki described her process of creating and administering learning activities that lead to final projects for a first semester Japanese language course during the Fall of 2020. Teaching the course completely online, Dr. Ozaki was concerned about the effects of student isolation and less 1-on-1 student and instructor interaction, and decided to focus on shared activities and creating a sense of community. Dr. Ozaki used a gamification strategy to portray class content as “sushi”, and applied “flavors” such as singing, tongue twisters, culture and personal stories in order to reach the academic goals for the course while promoting engagement and belonging. The final project in the course was an “Amazing Race” themed class audio visual project where students created a story to demonstrate their language mastery. Travelling within the realm of Japanese culture, the “Amazing Race” was performed via tasks and roadblocks concerning the articulation and vocabulary of the language. Dr. Ozaki described the process by which she created the associated learning activities within the Canvas LMS using the feedback features from a quiz to provide the access code for the next activity. Opportunities to redo these formative assessments for a perfect score gave students the repetition necessary to attain language mastery.