Gamification in the Business Communication Course

Abstract

Interest in gamification in higher education has been growing steadily in the past decade. Using games and game elements has been shown to increase student engagement, motivation, and autonomy. This article draws parallels between game elements, instructional design, and the teaching of business and professional communication. It suggests ways that teachers can incorporate game elements into their courses (or perhaps identifies ways in which readers are already doing so without realizing it). The article concludes with an example of how game elements are used in the design of an introductory business communication course.

Keywords

instructional design gamification pedagogy business communication learner centered

In her presidential address at the 2014 Association for Business Communication Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Kathryn Rentz described the challenges of teaching business and professional communication to millennials, the generation of students who were born between the mid-1980s and the 2000s. Drawing on the bookThe Kids are Alright(Beck & Wade, 2006), Rentz explained that the lives of these students have been shaped by technology, social networks, and video games. These students have shorter attention spans, spend less time in reflection, have a smaller sense of history, and expect a very different educational experience than their predecessors. “How do we engage and educate these students?” she asked. I propose that one solution is gamification, “the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts” (Deterding, Khaled, Nacke, & Dixon, 2011, p. 2). By incorporating elements of games into the design of business and professional communication courses, we may be able to engage, motivate, and empower our students while also helping ourselves reengage with the course and the practice of instructional design.

Elements of gamification include “storytelling, which provides a context, challenge, immediate feedback, sense of curiosity, problem-solving, a sense of accomplishment, autonomy and mastery” (Dale, 2014, p. 85). The practice of incorporating game elements into nongame activities is not new, of course.Monopolywas originally an educational game calledThe Landlord’s Game, intended to teach players about capitalism, taxation, and monopolistic real estate practices (Eskin, Trufelman, & Mars, 2015).Dale (2014)noted that airlines have given away frequent-flier miles and breakfast cereal companies have exchanged toys and prizes for box tops for decades. Moreover, computer games—includingWhere in the World is Carmen Sandiego?andOregon Trail—became widely used in K-12 education during the 1990s. In the 2000s, gamification exploded in marketing applications, entering the Gartner Hype Cycle in 2011 (Zichermann, 2011) before being folded into digital marketing in 2015 (McGuire, 2015).

Interest in gamification in higher education has been growing steadily in the past decade, although the concept is often surrounded by skepticism. Some teachers have difficulty imagining how to incorporate game elements into their courses. Others worry that gamification may trivialize the learning experience.Finseth (2015)argued that games are a valuable pedagogical design in technical communication instruction because they require students to take control of their learning and require teachers to continually reflect on and refine the design of instruction, a practice that he calls “theorycrafting the classroom” (p. 244). In fact,Stott and Neustaedter (2013)pointed out that many instructors already use elements of games in their courses. In this article, I draw parallels between game elements, instructional design, and the teaching of business and professional communication. I suggest ways in which teachers can incorporate game elements into their courses (or perhaps identify ways in which readers are already doing so without realizing it).

Games and game elements have been used to teach technical communication (Fisher, 2007;Russell & Fisher, 2009), cross-cultural workplace communication (Robinson et al., 2000), logistics and supply chain management (Reiners et al., 2012), history (Corbeil & Laveault, 2011), interpersonal relationships in an international business school (Witte, 2014), strategic management (Knotts & Keys, 1997), and team building (Beard, 1990;Scarfino & Roever, 2009), among others. Confounding factors make empirical study of gamification difficult, but there have been promising correlations with increased student engagement, motivation, and feelings of autonomy and control, factors that correlate with improved learning outcomes (Aguilar, Holman, & Fishman, 2015;Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014).Jabbar and Felicia’s (2015)literature review of game-based learning research showed that games positively affect engagement and learning, at least for middle and high school students. Obstacles, word problems, and puzzles require students to synthesize and apply knowledge, while role-playing games (RPGs) create an immersive experience in which students can explore an environment and try creative solutions.Corbeil and Laveault’s (2011)quasi-experiment showed that students participating in a simulation had higher comprehension (measured by test scores) than students in the control group, and the simulation was “as efficient as a lecture course” (p. 472) in knowledge acquisition and meeting the needs of students. The simulation seemed to motivate students to learn the material, particularly those who favor a sensory-motor style of learning.Banfield and Wilkerson (2014)proposed that the element of competition—against a group or against oneself—can motivate students to dig deeper or go farther than they would on their own. These findings suggest that designing assignments as problems to be solved and offering narratives rich with contextual cues can help students learn. However, gamification is not for everyone.Aguilar et al. (2015)noted a negative relationship between prior performance and feelings of ease with the format, suggesting that high-performing students may resist the unfamiliar format.Hamari et al. (2014)found problems with increased competition, task evaluation, and managing design features.

Understanding Games and Game Elements

Salen and Zimmerman (2003)noted that all games share several characteristics: artificial conflict, rules, and a quantifiable outcome. The goal of game design is meaningful play, an interaction between a player and a system to achieve an outcome. Games are governed by relatively simple rules and offer a limited arsenal of tools and actions that provide both possibility and structure. For example, “The rules of grammar might tell us how to organize words into sentences, but they cannot account forHuck Finn, the U.S. Constitution, and the lyrics to Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! I Did It Again’” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 160). In other words, the game designer creates rules and sets constraints, but the game is brought to life by the players in a unique way each time it is played.

By their very nature, games are inefficient and complex ways to achieve goals. Why do we accept arcane rules and long, convoluted, and often predetermined paths? Why can the bishop move only diagonally across the chessboard? InMonopoly, why is it so hard to get to the boardwalk but so easy to be sent directly to jail? Thelusory attitudeof games is an agreement by players to suspend reality for the sake of the game experience. AsSalen and Zimmerman (2003)explained, we accept and even expect unnecessary obstacles to be part of the game.

In this respect, higher education is similar to games. There are more efficient ways to prepare for a job, to develop skills, and to accrue a body of knowledge than to enroll in a series of 10- to 16-week classes over 4 or 5 years. But just as a game is more than a set of rules and a game board, higher education is more than a series of books, lectures, and classes. It is the synthesis of information for depth and breadth of knowledge, a look at the interconnectedness of disciplines, and an understanding of theory and history that students may not acquire on their own or by using shortcuts. The reward of both games and education is the entire experience gained through meaningful play.

Koster (2005)argued that games are basically puzzles. Although all games include a narrative to establish context or help players remember rules and goals, such as battling armies in chess or saving for retirement inThe Game of Life, players do not usually play a game for the story. They play for the challenge of solving the puzzle. Thus, a first step in gamifying a course is to begin to think of it as a magic circle of problems or puzzles with solutions that require specific communication skills, content knowledge, and creative thinking.Stott and Neustaedter (2013)identified four game characteristics that are essential to gamification in education:

Freedom to fail. When players know that they have multiple attempts to solve a puzzle or complete a quest, they are more likely to take risks and experiment with creative solutions.

Rapid feedback. Games constantly let players know their status with information about points, lives, and levels. They know immediately if they have succeeded on a quest or if they need to try again.

Progression.Players begin a game with simple challenges that teach them how to move, how to use tools, and how to accomplish basic tasks. At first, players are often assisted by a mentor, a nonplaying character that offers advice. As they progress through the game, players become increasingly independent and combine or adapt what they have learned from previous levels to face more complex quests and villains.

Storytelling and narrative. Games use narrative to create an imaginary world that immerses the player. Within this world, players must internalize terminology, behaviors, and cultural values to win. At one end of this spectrum are the small, contained stories of case studies; at the other end are immersive simulations that last several weeks or even an entire semester.Stott and Neustaedter (2013)explained that stories create a cohesive, realistic situation in which practicing skills and knowledge is more engaging than in assignments lacking similar contextual elements.

Gamifying a course means thinking about the user experience as equally important as the concepts or skills to be learned (Ferrara, 2013).Gee (2007)explained that video game designers create games that are uniquely user centered: Even learning how to use the system is constructed in a way that facilitates learning and retention through immediate use, reinforcement, and recognition of achievement. He offered 36 learning principles from games that can be applied to the design of instruction.Appendix Aidentifies nine of these principles and suggests ways to put them into practice within a business or professional communication course.

Successfully gamifying a course requires commitment to the instructional design process and using games as an “alternate lens” for making design decisions (Lawley, 2012, p. 16). A criticism about gamification is that it focuses on badges and points rather than making significant changes to the course structure and content.Robertson (2010)argued that gamification is actually “the process of takingthe thing that is least essential to gamesand representing it as the core of the experience.” Extrinsic rewards may motivate learners in the short term but do not produce lasting changes in behavior, motivation, or engagement. Only intrinsic motivation can do that, so instructional designers must understand the different forms that intrinsic motivation might take: recognition, personal achievement, responsibility, power, fun, or mastery (Dale, 2014).

Game Elements and the Design of Instruction

The prospect of gamifying a course might seem overwhelming, but it is not necessary to design, build, or code a complicated game in order to gamify learning. Simple educational games (sometimes called serious games) can be motivating as well:

Core mechanics and aesthetic production values in serious games may seem impoverished compared to successful commercial titles, especially in the fast-moving digital realm, but psychological criteria such as effort, valorization of outcome, competency, autonomy, and relatedness can still be sparked by the frame alone. (Lieberoth, 2015, p. 231)

Instructors can gamify courses in simple, yet engaging ways. It is easier and perhaps more practical to design the class as a “game space” (Chess & Booth, 2014, p. 1003) that uses narrative, design of assignments, videos or podcasts, and other interactions between the student and the course material. To assist readers in understanding typical gaming terminology and to inspire additional ideas for gamifying instruction, a short glossary is presented inAppendix B.

Introducing the Game

Smaller games or the use of game elements in traditional activities may require little or no explanation. When adapting or parodying popular games, it may be sufficient to point out the similarity and remind students of the rules andcore mechanic, or the activity that will be performed again and again. But immersive or complex games require instruction in how to play.Gee (2007)explained that players are never thrown into a video game unprepared, but they are not expected to read manuals either. Instead, they start in a “subset” of the game, an orientation level in which they are introduced to the world, the rules that must be followed, the commands that allow the player to move, and the skills the player will need to complete challenges.

When using simulations and RPGs, instructors should operate within a subset of the simulation for the first few meetings to introduce students to the course, the learning outcomes, the narrative, and the idea of working in a course format that is unlike the structure they already know.Knotts and Keys (1997)advised teachers to introduce the game immediately, even within the first class meeting. They argued that their research and 50 years of combined experience have proven that presenting textual material before starting the game simply does not help students learn the material well enough to implement it. Throughout the simulation, the instructor remains nearby, ready to answer questions or provide access to resources and information.

Using Imperfect Information and Noise

The area in which games and business or professional communication differ most may be the role of information and knowledge. According to information systems theory (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003), information is possibility and uncertainty, not meaning or content. According to this theory, highly detailed assignment specifications actually include less information than vague or ambiguous assignments because information that is left unsaid offers greater potential for problem-solving. If assignments are viewed as puzzles to be solved, then this “less is more” attitude toward information creates a space for creativity and critical thinking.

Applying the information systems theory to instructional design runs counter to the way many instructors teach, which involves attempting to provide all of the information users will need to understand a topic or take action. It is also counter to the way many instructors prepare assignments, repeatedly adding a few more details each term in an attempt to minimize questions and misunderstanding.Perfect knowledge gamesallow all of the players to know all of the information at the same time. For example, checkers, chess, andYahtzee!rely on perfect knowledge because both players can see all of the pieces and know the rules that govern their movements. By contrast,imperfect knowledge gamessuch as hangman, blackjack, andMastermindhide information from players; the information is revealed either by other players or by the game system itself in pieces, as needed, or sometimes not at all.Salen and Zimmerman (2003)suggested that strategically releasing information helps players learn without feeling overwhelmed.

Noise, the extraneous information that distracts and confuses the receiver, is an equally important part of the learning experience.Lanham’s (2006)theory of oscillation says that students must develop an ability to filter information and focus attention. Because employers will not hand out assignment specifications and rubrics, noisy assignments such as case studies, simulations, and RPGs use possibility and uncertainty to teach students to listen or read carefully, parse instructions, and identify key details. Even presenting an assignment as a conversation between nonplayer characters can introduce noise: Students must learn to identify red herrings, ignore gossip or conversational fillers, and focus on the real problem to be solved.

A special class of imperfect knowledge games, such asCivilization, uses a fog of war design in which the landscape is initially hidden and players discover it through movements and interactions with other players. The fog of war can also be a reminder to avoid overwhelming students with too much information at a time. The information that students need is present in textbooks, videos, podcasts, slide decks and lecture notes, and shared course files, but it may be hidden from view initially. As the course progresses, supplemental information can appear when needed, when unlocked by the achievement of a learning objective, or when students explore that section of the course on their own. For example, a personnel chart might appear during a lesson about interpersonal communication to illustrate how a person’s role in the corporate structure affects decisions about content, tone, organization, and medium. A reference-style textbook such asThe Business Writer’s Handbook(Alred, Oliu, & Brusaw, 2015) can provide “explicit information on demand and just-in-time” (Gee, 2007, p. 137).

Imperfect knowledge has its limits, of course. For the game to be meaningful, players must be able to recognize the relationship between their decisions and the outcome. The “Black Box Syndrome” of games means that players cannot understand how the game works (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 88). When outcomes appear to be arbitrary, unfair, or random, players experience uncertainty and frustration, which disrupts meaningful play. Rubrics, checklists, and references to readings in assignment feedback can help students see this relationship. Grade contracts can create transparency in course evaluation, and additive grading can create a sense of autonomy and control. AsStott and Neustaedter (2013)have argued, additive grading “celebrates getting things right” (p. 1).

Creating Multiple Routes to Learning

Games typically offer more than one way to reach the outcome. Themultiple routes principleoffers a sense of autonomy by creating opportunities to make choices and experiment with new skills or techniques (Gee, 2007). To avoid overwhelming learners with choice or ambiguity, the unit or course must have a core message. Acore messageis a simple statement that “helps people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important” (Heath & Heath, 2007, p. 37). It suggests a strategy but leaves considerable flexibility about the tactics that will be used to achieve the goal. Coincidentally,Heath and Heath (2007)used military war games as an example of core messages. The core message might be “take that hill,” but the commanders are able to choose tactics that respond to changing conditions. In business and professional communication, assignment goals can be expressed as core messages, such as “Communicate this bad news to our client without losing her business.” By focusing on strategy rather than tactics, we offer students space for creative problem-solving within a given set of rules and constraints. Core messages and multiple routes also create the possibility of replayability, or creating a different experience by changing variables within the problem.

Multiple routes can also be incorporated into the components of the course. TheChoose Your Own Adventure(CYOA) story model uses multiple routes to allow readers to experience different stories within one novel. In simulations and RPGs, designers can create a CYOA assignment quest chain that offers a range of choices that customize assignments in a manner that is controlled by the instructor. Although mapping out a CYOA story can be done manually, the free web-based authoring service Inklewriter (http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/) organizes content and prompts the writer to branch and link threads in a story. Another variation of multiple routes encourages students to create documents that fit into the semiotic domains of their academic disciplines or chosen careers. For example,Ball (2011)shared the menu of assignments used by the Oregon Institute of Technology to encourage a range of domain-specific assignments. Doing so respects the goals and knowledge of students by creating connections between business and professional communication and the courses within their major discipline.

Giving Students Freedom to Fail

Game play ends when a player dies. But in video games, players are only mostly dead. The next turn often returns the player to a save point earlier in the game so the player can try a different strategy and seek a better result. The save point creates a “psychosocial moratorium” that gives the player freedom to take risks and fail without losing too much progress (Gee, 2007, p. 61). By incorporating freedom to fail into instructional design, designers create activities in which students experiment with new genres, personas, writing styles, or communication technologies. For example, offering opportunities for revision lowers the risk of experimentation as the student learns how to conform to the conventions of the industry or to write for external audiences. Learning from mistakes and seeing evidence of improvement between drafts can help students build confidence in their abilities as professional communicators. Structured peer reviews can teach students how to recognize good communication and how to offer constructive suggestions to others. Portfolio grading allows students to revise assignments incrementally as they learn new concepts and skills and then select their best work for a summative assessment.

Offering Feedback and Rewards

Engagement and meaningful play hinge on immediate feedback about the player’s status (e.g., location, health, resources) that helps the player evaluate progress and modify strategies. Giving students a way to view the grade book is a simple way to indicate progress, but more robust reward structures are necessary for positive reinforcement. Common rewards are points, badges, power-ups, and access to hidden spaces. Sometimes the reward is simply recognition, such as displaying a player’s Mii on the Whale Shark blimp in NintendoWii Sports Resort.

Leaderboards assign a quantitative value to behaviors or demonstrations of knowledge and share it with all players, but their use in education is somewhat controversial. In one of the few empirical studies about gamification,Landers and Landers (2014)found that leaderboards were positively correlated with time on task, which has been shown to improve performance. However, they noted that leaderboards are imperfect tools that reward small victories while hiding overall performance.

Instructors must remember that not all students are motivated by the same rewards. While a leaderboard may motivate competitive students to work harder, overt competition may inhibit other students. Leaderboards can also backfire: Putting too much emphasis on point systems may suggest that competition and extrinsic rewards are more important than learning. Thus, a variety of reward systems should be used to appeal to different types of players. Recognizing examples of excellence or sharing students’ work (with their permission) with the rest of the class are other forms of glory that may motivate students. Secret levels and Easter eggs can reward students who explore the course materials thoroughly. Badges can recognize competencies and accomplishments without being linked to points. For example, to link procedural knowledge, formative course assessment, and reflective thinking, instructors could circulate a request for proposals that asks students to suggest improvements to the course. Students who submit feasible ideas earn “Instructional Design Apprentice” badges on their profiles or on a course website.

To accommodate students with varying strengths, prior experience, and competitive spirit, instructors should offer multiple ways to appear on the board. The challenges reflected in the leaderboard should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound. For example,Landers and Landers (2014)have suggested leaderboard challenges based on time (first to do X), quantity (most Y), and quality (best Z), along with combinations of these factors (Best A by Benchmark 1). In choosing content for leaderboards, instructors must be careful not to reveal information that is protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, but they can display progress toward a goal or relative order of players.Table 1suggests activities that could be included in leaderboards.

Table 1.

Examples of Leaderboard Challenges.

Time challenges	First post on a discussion board
	First reply to a discussion board post
	First three <to do something>
Quantity challenges	Most interviews conducted
	Player versus player scoring on presentations of the same topic
	Jeopardy!™ style quiz games
Quality challenges	Usefulness rating of classmates on blog entries or summaries
	Peer review scores using a common rubric
	Best suggestions for new course activities

As important and effective as rewards may be, it is also important to be stingy with their distribution, particularly as the game progresses to more difficult levels.Pink (2009)cautioned that rewards work well when the goal is clear and resources and constraints are known, but they inhibit creative thinking in ill-structured or design problems. Giving out rewards too often or too easily cheapens them.

Choosing the Format

Novice game designers may wish to begin by adding simple or familiar games to existing curricula. For example, some instructors use scavenger hunts to test student knowledge of the course syllabus. Procedural and conceptual information can be demonstrated using charades or a drawing game such asPictionary. Factual knowledge can be tested using a homemade version of the game showJeopardy!Oral presentations can be structured to resemble the television programAmerica’s Got Talent, with an initial round of “auditions” before a panel of judges who move the strongest presentations to a final round of voting by the audience. Debriefs with the students can help them identify and explain the characteristics that led to high or low votes.

With a little more time and effort, a business or professional communication course could be designed as a simulation or RPG. Both types of games invite players to interact with fictional worlds populated by characters, settings, resources, and situations that are linked by a narrative thread. The primary difference is that players keep their own identity in simulations but assume the identity of a game character (e.g., angry customer) in an RPG. Through quests, students construct a series of increasingly complex documents that respond to plausible activities and requests for information in the workplace. Simulations help students move away from the domain of academic writing and introduce them to a subdomain of workplace writing, in which the expectations of audiences are different and readers are not paid to read everything the student writes.

More ambitious designers and new media scholars may wish to go a step further and develop alternate reality games (ARGs). ARGs are narrative-rich games that run in real time and use a variety of media (e.g., websites, videos, phone calls, visits to special locations) to reveal clues and present puzzles to be solved. Unlike most traditional games, the rules of ARGs are often unstated and the person or artificial intelligence controlling the game may be invisible. In fact, players may not even realize they are entering the game until they have already begun to play. As such, ARGs create a more immersive experience than RPGs and simulations. The mystery thriller filmThe Game(1997) is a fictional example of anARG. Fisher (2007)described an academic ARG called MyCase, an immersive simulation that was created to teach technical communication in which students juggle multiple projects and interact with characters within a realistic but fictional setting.Russell and Fisher (2009)have argued that MyCase creates a genre system that contextualizes learning while allowing the instructor to control and guide the learning experience in ways that are not possible in internships and service learning.Fisher (2007)has suggested that building the content management system that operates MyCase “is not as daunting as one might first think,” yet he admits that this type of game requires a multidisciplinary team of developers, including “disciplinary experts, practitioners, curriculum and web developers, and pilot users” (p. 196).

The development phase of the instructional design cycle is the point at which many people think of including game elements in a course, but the planning should begin much earlier. Inspired byFisher (2007), but lacking a development team and computer programming skills, I developed a text-based simulation to teach business communication. In the following section, I describe the simulation and explain how the game elements described above influenced design decisions.

Game Space: Designing the Business Communication Course

Since 2006, I have used a simulation in an undergraduate business communication course. A narrative thread links all of the major assignments in the course and presents students with opportunities to write a variety of documents that might be assigned to an intern or entry-level employee. As the course progresses, students are given greater freedom in their assignments, reflecting the responsibility and autonomy that comes with workplace experience. Many of the materials described here, including a course map, sample assignments, and rubrics, are available atwww.jenniferveltsos.com/courses/mprovise.

The Course

The business communication course is part of the university’s general education curriculum. Only the music industry program requires the course, but it can substitute for the technical communication course that is required by several science, engineering, and technology programs. Institutional data, class rosters, and informal surveys administered at the beginning of every term are used to develop and refine student personas that inform the course design. The university’s institutional review board considers these surveys exempt from research because they are part of ordinary instructional activities and not intended to generalize knowledge to other contexts. The data indicate that students tend to be traditional undergraduates (i.e., 18 to 22 years of age, attending college directly following high school) from the upper Midwest region of the United States. In most semesters, the number of second-, third-, and fourth-year students is nearly evenly split; first-year students rarely take the course. Students typically work at least 20 hours per week but have little or no professional communication experience. Most view the course as a requirement to be met but are not interested in its content (at least at the beginning of the term) because it is not part of their major.

Framing the Course Design Through the Lens of Games

The business communication course is designed as a text-based simulation. The core message of the course is that workplace communication is only successful when it is written for particular audiences, purposes, and situations. To reinforce the core message, a narrative simulation is used in which students adopt the identity of a business communication intern at m-Provise, a fictional company located in Mankato. M-Provise can take a variety of forms, but it usually makes games. In a few instances, m-Provise sold athletic equipment, communication technology, and household goods. Examples of these products were purchased from a thrift store and brought to class for writing workshops. These “samples from our catalog” provided details about the items for students to use in their documents and added a tangible component to the simulation.

Onboarding

Backward design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) and scaffolding techniques (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) were used to plan the progression of the course. Onboarding begins in Week 1 when students are presented with a job advertisement for a business communication internship. As we analyze the advertisement and draft application letters and résumés, the conversation introduces the core message of the course. The introduction continues in Week 2 when the job advertisement is revealed to be part of the simulation, and the assignments, revision policy, and evaluation techniques are explained. Beginning the course with an easily recognizable writing activity helps the students engage with the content immediately, and stretching the onboarding over 2 weeks gives them time to understand the “rules of play” and ask questions about the format of the course before we delve more deeply into the subject matter.

Storytelling and Narrative

Within the simulation, students encounter a variety of nonplayer characters, including Lori Hunt, the vice president of product development and the intern’s supervisor; Ross Hall, a colleague in the department with a few years of experience; Alice Grant, the director of human resources who borrows the intern for a special project; and Delinda Young, the director of customer service. The character list that I developed for myself when composing the assignments became an organizational chart for the students to review; it features these characters and others whom the student does not “meet,” such as the CEO, Alexander Matthews. The characters and organizational chart help students understand the concept of primary and secondary audiences. They also create opportunities to consider the relationships, rivalries, and hierarchies of the workplace and how those interpersonal factors affect communication decisions.

Progression and Multiple Routes

Instructional units are arranged to present the core message in the initial assignment and to progressively layer competencies and learning objectives. Some of the learning objectives are part of the university’s general education curriculum. Others were written to reflect the content of the course and to align with the competencies of being professional, clear, concise, evidence driven, and persuasive (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). Learning objectives for the evidence-driven competency might be “use spreadsheet software to accurately calculate a quarterly sales report” and “create charts and graphs that ethically and accurately summarize sales data for a quarterly sales report.”

The challenges consist of several traditional business communication assignments that were inspired by my own professional experience in the industry or that are commonly found in business and professional communication textbooks. These assignments are linked by the m-Provise narrative thread and follow a progression that emulates an internship. As the students/interns gain experience, their tasks increase in complexity and reinforce earlier skills and knowledge through practice. For example, at the beginning of the internship, the interns write ordinary correspondence that responds to a variety of situations. As their experience develops, they are given tasks of increasing responsibility, all for different audiences and purposes. With a little more experience, they are entrusted to write a routine report that summarizes and visualizes sales data for the director of new products. They research policies related to a problem at work for the director of human resources and, when the research is approved, they repurpose the information into a sample policy statement and slide deck for the director to share with the CEO and legal counsel.Table 2illustrates the progression of the typical learning outcomes and activities that were modified for the m-Provise simulation.

Table 2.

Aligning Learning Activities and the m-Provise Simulation With Learning Objectives.

Sample learning objective	Sample learning activity	Sample simulation scenario
Analyze the audience, purpose, and context of specific communication situations.	Introduce yourself to three audiences. Analyze the audience, purpose, and context of given situations.	Analyze a given job advertisement for a business communication internship at a game company. Write an application letter for the position.
Compose effective business correspondence (memos, letters, emails) that respond to positive, negative, and neutral situations.	Write correspondence that responds to given situations.	Respond to given examples of internal and external correspondence that will be signed by your supervisor.
Compose informational messages that communicate clearly, concisely, accurately, and ethically.	Explain how to register for classes to new students.	Given a problem at work, assist the HR director by researching policies at other organizations. Identify themes and report them to the HR director.
Use research methods to collect and organize information for business documents.		Using the information learned, draft a new policy for the HR director to review and share with the management team.
Implement principles of effective document design in preparing business documents.	Design a brochure for your major.	Assume that an existing game was created by m-Provise. Create a brochure or poster to describe the features and rules of play for the given game.
Develop a standard business report.	Create charts and graphs of given data.	Using given sales data, write a quarterly sales report for the sales director featuring appropriate data displays and interpretations.
Demonstrate a professional image when presenting information.	Deliver a Pecha Kucha or lightning round presentation.	Prepare and present a 5-minute report of the sales data for the weekly staff meeting.
		Prepare and present a short video presentation of the new policy for the corporate intranet.
Practice critical thinking in workplace situations by analyzing, constructing, and supporting arguments with reasons and evidence.	Revise the application letter written earlier in the term.	Create a press release and promotional text for a given game.As the internship comes to a close, apply for a new job.
	Write an application letter and résumé for an internship.
	Write promotional text to sell an existing product.
Effectively collaborate with other students to develop workplace documents, manage large projects, and solve communication problems.	Final exam or comprehensive project	Collaborate with fellow interns to create a new game and pitch it to the R&D director. Components include:● Market analysis of potential players● Rules of play● Game board, card, or video design● Pitch letter/email● Promotional copy for product marketing materials● Oral presentation for the pitch
Define business communication and its role in a student’s career.Reflect on learning during the course.	Reflection essayMidterm or end-of-term course evaluation	Evaluate your performance and compare it to the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the term. How have your skills improved? What should you continue to develop? How will these skills help you in your career?

In the final 5 weeks of the course, students may choose to earn additional points through optional assignments. The optional assignments create multiple routes to learning, allowing students to gain additional practice or experiment with documents or communication tasks that were not developed in the required assignments.

Assignments as Puzzles to Be Solved

In the simulation, each assignment is aquest, or a collection of tasks that must be completed to achieve an outcome. The assignments are written as vignettes in which the intern interacts with nonplaying characters to receive work assignments. These vignettes are ill-structured problems (Jonassen, 1997) that present imperfect information surrounded by noise. The student must sift through the conversation to determine the rhetorical situation, scope of work, deadline, and available data. The student must review given documents and then locate and evaluate any additional information that is needed, use (or learn) appropriate technology, and apply the relevant conceptual and procedural knowledge to complete the task.

In large- and small-group discussions, the students identify the goal of the quest. My role is to be a mentor: I can help them analyze the situation and locate resources, but I am not an audience for the document. As student competence develops, the structure of course meetings may become less tightly controlled. My role shifts from providing direct instruction to whatMcArdle (2007)has called the trainer roles of coach or facilitator, as opposed to instructor or consultant.

Rapid Feedback

Players constantly know their status in a game, which is easy to do when computers are tallying quantifiable information. Students have become accustomed to rapid feedback in games, and the delay between submitting an assignment and receiving feedback is often a source of frustration for both students and the instructor. Although instantaneous feedback may never be a reality in writing-intensive business or professional communication courses,Kapp (2012)suggested that rapid feedback can help maintain student engagement. Balancing a variety of closed- and open-ended activities can help instructors manage their workload while offering students regular updates on their performance and status. Quizzes hosted in the course management system are graded automatically. Similarly, evaluation rubrics help me offer consistent feedback about a document’s strengths or weaknesses. They function as quick-reference guides for students as they develop their projects and as a starting point for end comments during grading. Hosting the rubrics within the learning management system enables students to see the score and feedback as soon as it is saved, allows feedback to be revised (such as adding new comments on later drafts so that the student and I can review its history), and pushes the score into the grade book automatically. These features facilitate rapid feedback and help manage the revision process.

Assignments are scored holistically in terms of their readiness for distribution to the intended audience:excellent(5 points, no revisions or only minor revisions necessary),acceptable(3 points, minor or moderate revisions necessary),submitted(1 point, significant revisions necessary), ormissing/unacceptable(0 points).

Freedom to Fail

Games can often inspire strong emotions, from curiosity to frustration and disappointment tofiero, the feeling of elation that accompanies a victory (McGonigal, 2011). Designing assignments and activities that keep students on the outer edge of their “regime of competence” (Gee, 2007, p. 69) can create feelings of excitement and accomplishment. In order to reach that outer edge, students must know that failure is an option. In order for learning to occur, they must know that they can recover from failure.

Students may submit only one assignment at a time, and I promise to grade the assignment within 7 days. When I return a document and post their scores, students may submit a new document immediately. All assignments may be revised and resubmitted twice, offering students the freedom to fail as they try new skills and create unfamiliar documents. To manage my workload and to help students progress steadily, revisions must be submitted no more than 1 week after students receive their feedback. Under the current grading system, conversations about assignments have changed from “What did I do wrong?” to “How do I revise this to make it excellent?” Although a subtle shift, the change is a welcome one.

Rewards

The grading system has evolved from subtractive grading (2006-2012) to contract grading (2012-2014) to additive grading (2014-present). Subtractive grading assumes that all students start with a perfect score and deducts points for errors or deviations from the expected solution. Framing a grade in this manner “punishes students for taking risks and stifles creativity” (Stellar, 2013). Contract grading allows the student and teacher to negotiate the amount and type of work to be done during the term; in most cases, the contract may not be renegotiated. Additive grading, by contrast, resembles the scoring within games: Students begin at zero and earn points by successfully completing tasks and quests. The revise-and-resubmit policy allows students to try to improve their scores by improving their assignments.Sheldon (2012)has pointed out that additive grading methods are mathematically the same as subtractive ones but offer a greater sense of autonomy to the students.

In my additive grading system, students can earn up to 75 points through attendance, reading quizzes, participation in discussions and workshops, and five required assignments. To earn additional points, students may choose to complete optional assignments from a given menu. Students may earn up to 100 points, and grades break on the traditional 10-point scale (90+ = A, 80-89 = B, etc.).

The combination of holistic grading and optional assignments is an attempt to create a consistent learning experience for students. For example, contract grading offers autonomy and control, but it also creates an opening for degenerate strategies: Most students will select only those assignments that play to their strengths, but others will stop working once they have earned enough points to pass the course. The additive grading scheme levels the playing field using whatGee (2007)has called the “achievement principle” (p. 69). Everyone who completes the course must meet all of the learning objectives and display a basic competency, but students who do more work and demonstrate greater mastery of the competencies can earn more points and higher grades.

In games, a scoreboard displays the players’ progress and accomplishments. Due to privacy concerns, the grade book in the learning management system has been the only scoreboard so far, and students are unaware of their performance in relation to their peers. In future iterations of the course, a leaderboard will be posted within the course website to share performance on several indicators of performance and participation (seeTable 2). Students will be able to select their own avatars and usernames for the leaderboard to conceal their identities.

The business communication course described here is a simulation but not a game. Rather, this overarching design of the course uses game elements to create an immersive experience for the learners. The interactions with nonplaying characters help the students envision the audience(s) who will use their documents to make decisions or to develop other documents. The vignettes and their accompanying paratext such as sticky notes, spreadsheets, budgets, and brochures help simulate the experience of stepping into an environment in medias res, similar to the actual experience of an intern or new employee. By assuming the identity of an intern for the duration of the semester, students must stop writing for/as themselves and consider how to respond calmly and responsibly on behalf of the company. As the students develop their communication competencies, the assignments present workplace problems of increased complexity and responsibility.

Conclusion

Although finding ways to engage modern students can seem like a challenge, incorporating game elements into the design of a business or professional communication course establishes common ground with students, a way of “acknowledging the students’ reality and of bringing this reality into the classroom” (Markopoulos, Fragkou, Kasidiaris, & Davim, 2015, p. 125). The result is a course in which the instructor can adopt a playful but purpose-driven attitude toward their work, and the students can rise to the challenge created by progressive and self-driven mastery of the topic. The literature shows that gamification can improve student engagement, motivation, and feelings of autonomy in education.

Game elements provide a framework onto which an educator’s instructional approach can be mapped, analyzed, and refined, thereby contributing to the instructor’s own professional growth. In many cases, readers may have realized that they are already using game elements in their instructional design (Stott & Neustaedter, 2013). These game elements can guide instructors in their approach to designing the course, communications about the course goals and activities, and reflective and deliberate instructional design choices. Using game elements has made teaching the course more enjoyable to me, which in turn has improved my own engagement and motivation, something that can be difficult to sustain for anyone teaching the same course over multiple semesters.

The simulation described here offers a relatively authentic assignment that drives discussions about communication situations rather than just workplace documents. A danger of RPGs, simulations, and ARGs is that the game may become the focus of the students’ attention. The instructor should regularly encourage students to step back and generalize how the tools and techniques they use for one project may be extended to use on other similar projects. This metalevel thinking helps students see how communication practices are adaptable from one workplace or discipline to another.

Although there is a growing body of research on the use of gamification in higher education, these studies tend to be small and limited in scope. The benefits of gamification are harder to extend to other courses and/or disciplines when it is unclear whether an improvement to a course is due to a changing population of students, continuous refinement of the course curriculum, or the adoption of game elements. To help resolve this challenge,Landers (2014)suggested several ways to isolate and test the impact of game elements. Future research should continue to develop quasi-experiments and other empirical studies of the effects of games and game elements. Such research would be an important contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Footnotes

Appendix A

ApplyingGee’s (2007)Learning Principles to Business Communication Instruction.

Principle	Practice
Semiotic domains: Game content and rules govern behavior, tools, language, and relationships with other players.	Help students build a mental model of professional communication through the use of tools, terminology, case studies, examples, videos, and graphics. What do people do at work? How do they do it? Why do they do it that way? What norms of behavior or genre conventions set expectations?
Situated meaning: Words, objects, and symbols have specific and unique meanings within each game.	Tell stories. Give examples. Show models. Discuss previous experience and current events. Use metaphors. Help students make connections between the new material and what they already know.
Metalevel thinking about semiotic domains: Games require players to make connections between worlds and to adapt their skills to new adversaries.	Students need to see the relevance of the course to other things they do at work or in their lives. They need some context and connections. Help students find relationships between new information and the information they already know (or think they do). Scaffold assignments from simple to complex.
Psychosocial moratorium: Games allow players to take risks and try creative, unorthodox strategies in a space where real-world risks are lowered.	Give students plenty of chances to apply what they have learned and plenty of feedback so they can make corrections. Use peer reviews. Allow students to revise and resubmit assignments. Have students explain their decisions—even bad ones—in design statements and reflections.
Identity: Games require players to assume alternate identities and behave accordingly.	Students must see the new knowledge or skill as an essential part of their professional identity. Case studies and role playing allow students to consider alternate perspectives.
Practice: Games allow players to practice skills repeatedly, spending lots of time on task.	Balance minilectures with workshops, peer reviews, presentations, and discussions. Use flipped classroom techniques to allow more time for drafting and revision during class. Scaffold assignments by starting simple and layering skills progressively. Create “boss fights” or comprehensive assignments for the end of the term.
Regime of competence: Games challenge players to operate at the outer edge of their abilities.	Push students to go beyond their comfort zones. Encourage them to take risks and reward them for doing so, even if the risk does not pay off (see psychosocial moratorium and practice).
Multiple routes: Games allow players to make choices about paths or strategies. There is rarely only one way to win.	Whenever possible, allow students to make choices that customize the course to fit their interests, learning styles, or problem-solving styles. Create a menu of optional assignments.^aUse portfolios so students can select their best work. Offer extra credit (power-ups) for attending and writing about extracurricular activities related to the class.
Intuitive knowledge: Games, particularly collaborative games, reward knowledge developed from repeated practice and prior experience.	Give students a chance to answer questions or solve problems, then probe their answers to recognize tacit knowledge. “How did you know that? Why did you do that? Why did you not do something else?”

For a detailed example of a menu of assignments, seeBall’s (2011)description of the course at the Oregon Institute of Technology.

Appendix B

Author’s Note

Portions of this article were presented at the 77nd annual meeting of the Association for Business Communication, Honolulu, HI, 2012, and at the 2013 Computers and Writing Conference, Frostburg, MD.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by a Teaching Scholar Fellowship grant from Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Author Biography

Jennifer R. Veltsosis an associate professor of English in the technical communication program at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her research focuses on organizational rhetoric, visual communication, and business communication pedagogy.

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