Designing Online Games Assessment as : Information Trails

Abstract

Online retailers make successful use of sophisticated online tracking mechanisms to profile their customers in order to understand their buying habits. Online multiplayer games make use of similar technologies to keep track of gamers’ activities, for better management of in-game resources and to settle disputes. However, educators looking to online games as a learning tool lack a similarly powerful strategy to help them reconstruct users’ gaming decisions in order to understand the learners and make effective use of games as teaching/learning tool. Moreover, it is necessary to develop an assessment component for online games to measure its effectiveness, or the return of investment. This chapter outlined a strategy to design the much needed assessment into online games as “information trails.”