By Patrick Smith
Snapshot
Type of Interaction: Asynchronous
Type of Course: Face-to-face, Hybrid, Flipped Classroom, Online
Credit
Dr. David Gibbs: Department of Health Information Management
One instructor was looking for a way to have students stay up to date with current events in the Health Information Management (HIM) field, but didn’t want to create an assignment that seemed like “busy work” (or that would create a tedious amount of grading for the instructor!).
As a result, we developed a competitive “game” titled the “Current Events Challenge”. Each team elected a “tribute” to represent the team in the week’s challenge. The tribute chose a current event (text-based, video, audio, etc.) and posted the item for the class to review. The tribute included a persuasive rationale for why they thought their item was a good match for the topic being covered in the course that week.
Once all the tributes had posted a current event, the entire class voted on which tribute posted the most interesting item that was relevant to the topics covered in the course that particular week. Tribute posting and voting was done anonymously, and mechanics were put into place to dissuade students from simply voting for their own tribute each week.
Each team received points in the course for their tribute posting a current event. The teams who won the voting, however, won “game points” that could then earn extra credit on exams and assignments.