To address the learning, teaching, and functional issues in a pandemic, large-sized class, and virtual learning environment, a two-week-long serious game was designed to act as the main welcome activity. Three hundred twenty students played through four scenarios with the pandemic as their background, and a narrative device contributed to an immersive learning environment. The game was deployed over two weeks, using a range of reports, video content, online collaborative platforms, and novelty applied mass communication theory, which effectively enhanced inter- and intra-team interaction and prepared the students for their project management team-based experiential learning. This case study will walk readers through the processes and theories used to create the game and ensure its operational, social, and pedagogic benefits.
TopIntroduction
2020/21 was the first academic year that the students of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) had to start their learning during a pandemic. The University of Manchester MSc Management of Projects (MoP) degree enrolled 320 students, 80% of them were international students. International students on our programme were going to have no chance to get into the campus to study or go through the vital supporting processes that make learning more efficient and enjoyable, such as negotiating new relationships with fellow students and lecturers. They faced the challenge of studying the course purely online, across fourteen hours of time zones. The teaching staff had to deal with the fact that their students were also dealing with the pandemic, creating new challenges for the administration and lecturers to simultaneously handle never-before-experienced emergent crisis issues as well as deliver the intended teaching and learning material.
Most of the teaching materials in our project management degree are based around experiential learning and team-based learning. In such a learning environment, to complete the assessments and gain credit, students need to be able to obtain experience of management in project-based teamwork (Jeong and Bozkurt, 2014); as well as be able to adapt to work with students from diverse cultural or educational backgrounds. Most students are without previous experience in working in large-sized, international teams. The nature of very large size cohort environments makes some students feel lost and lack a sense of belonging to the cohort (Stewart and Wang, 2019). Entering this context unprepared can directly impact students’ emotional status, mental health and learning experience.
At the beginning of each year, due to the large class size, issues such as students not knowing how to find team members, different preferences in communication platforms and taking too long to do ice-breaking, regularly occur. These cause an inefficient start to our teaching activities. These are common problems in a normal year, but this is even more serious in a situation where students will never occupy the same physical space. Not occupying the same space causes the vital team formation stages of ‘forming’ and ‘storming’ to be more unpredictable as normal channels for resolving early conflict are unavailable. Good relationships are also vital for the good mental health of students, which was under particular threat due to the isolating effects of distance learning and the crises of Covid (Grubic, Badovinac and Johri, 2020).
Due to this, the University extended the length of ‘welcome week’, from one to three weeks, which gave more time to prepare the lecturers and students to handle the challenges of this teaching and learning environment. The main purpose of a welcome week is to lead the students to engage with the administrative, technical, and social aspects of the teaching & learning environment. Such engagement and preparation helps the transition from previous undergraduate education to postgraduate to lead the students to engage with the technical and social aspects of the teaching and learning environment (Leese, 2010). In a normal year, there would be several activities to get students into groups, to discover each other and the university campus, as well as begin to establish working relationships that would carry them through the coming year. None of this would be possible now. A meaningful welcome activity for students was needed, something to simultaneously deliver the needed social gains especially in starting the social integration that is vital for a successful, motivated cohort as well as build some pedagogically useful skills.
The following is presented as a case study of a Serious Game in production, which was designed to satisfy these needs. The objectives of this case study are to:
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Present the contextual drivers behind the decision to develop a serious game and subsequently shape its design
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Identify the processes and theories used to create the game and ensure its operational, social, and pedagogic benefits.
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Present the game mechanism and how it made the students a part of the game function, materials, and the overall user experience of the game.
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Present the game’s strengths and weaknesses in operation and what the academics learned regarding the use of team-based, mixed-media Serious Games at a high scale.