Gamification

Werbach's lectures are great. I really enjoyed watching them and taking useful notes. Most of the time he is talking about obvious things, but for some reasons people miss those things while working on gamified systems in real life. Course materials are of a high quality and a lot of students are willing to buy professor's book and continue getting more knowledge in that field. Also it could be a very good experience to begin your online education with that course.

Assignments are interesting too. There are three of them. It is really engaging to think about questions that are presented during the course. Reading assignments of other students is engaging as well.

But there is one thing that ruined all positive experience for me - students who absolutely don't understand how the website, assessments and discussion forum work. People are making a huge number of threads on discussion forum and no one answers them because there already are several absolutely similar thread. It causes the situation when good thread are move several pages down. As a result people just do not read discussion forum, do not participate in discussions. The only thread that is useful - the pinned one where professor answers the questions (he doesn't answer in other threads). At the same time student really don't care about assessments. Some one can take away half your points and leave no explanations (while it is required), while all other reviewers gave you maximum points. No one tries to explain people how to review the works and what grading rubrics mean. Good students who pay money really suffers because of students who absolutely do not care and don't understand how their behaviour influence others.

Kevin Werbach really integrates his content into his lectures, which are interesting and full of real-world examples. He even “gamifies” his lectures a bit by telling students to look for a hidden code in the background of his lectures. Lectures are both easy AND fun to watch.

Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone, since gamification can be applied to almost any thing/field/area. This is a course where I feel that the lectures are MUCH MORE beneficial than the assignments. In fact, I probably would’ve rated the course higher if there were no written assignments.

I would actually highly recommend Werbach’s Gamification to students who don’t really want to devote themselves to a full MOOC; Just sign up and watch all of the lecture videos without dedicating yourself to the assignments. I think a student can learn just as much by watching the lectures and applying the knowledge to his own life/business.

Gamification provides an overview of using game elements in non-game contexts. The primary purpose of gamification is to give people extra encouragement to do something that they may not be adequately motivated to do on their own. For instance, a business that wants to improve the overall health of its employees to reduce health care costs might introduce a gamified system to encourage workers to exercise. Similarly, a company with a web application might introduce game elements like points and badges and community interaction to encourage activity on the app.

The course does a good job summarizing the basics of gamification, such as how gamification can be useful, how gamification differs from games, elements of gamified systems, motivation and psychology of players and limits to gamification. It also lays out a basic design framework for creating gamified systems, covers basic design choices, risks and possible legal concerns.

Gamification is an easy, fun course, that benefits from quality instruction and an interesting topic. You’ll come away from this course with a solid understanding of what gamification is, how it can be employed and how to think about designing gamified systems. Afterward, you’ll probably start recognizing gamification all around you.

Absolutely delightful experience. Interesting, engaging, and fun couse. Great videos and examples such as piano stairs http://www.thefuntheory.com/piano-staircase (watch other finalist's work on this site, it's quite amazing). Short sci-fi film "Sight" in the end about the world where google glass is everything and everywhere is fascinating and disturbing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_cdkpazjI

The quality of the course materials is superb: Professor Werbach's lectures are entertaining, engaging, and informative. Homework consisted of quizzes and peer-graded assignments. Some students criticised the quality of the peer reviews, but I found these assignments very important for one who wants to dig deeper into the subject.

I highly recommend this course for anyone, either for business/marketing purposes or just for fun.