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Reward Model

Page history last edited by Judith Molka-Danielsen 13 years, 8 months ago

 

 


 

This document is licensed under a „Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Austria“ Licence (“Creative Commons Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Österreich”). Further details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/at/

 

Autor: Gerhilde Meissl-Egghart, talkademy.org

 

 

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

 

Second Life is a registered trademark of LindenLab coorp., San Francisco other mentioned trademarks are respected properties of their owners.

 

 

Introduction

 

 

This deliverable describes the model of motivation why people would like to participate in the AVALON action learning events. It is linked to the other deliverables in this work-package and the work-packages 3 and 4 of the AVALON project. It is a “living” document during the project live-time, starting with basic assumptions prior designing the action learning events and will eventually later incorporate the learnings from the actual execution of these learning events.

 

Audience

 

The special focus of this deliverable is to model those meta-data features, which are reflecting the motivation why people would like to participate in action learning events. Thus the intended audience of this deliverables are course designers, content creators and the IT specialists implementing the 2D / 3D integration.

 

Motivation

 

Why do people decide to participate in a language course? Obviously, because they, or at least the logical component of their brain, consider it being important to improve their language skills.

What makes people stay in the course, although their timetables are loaded with other duties? At this point it becomes useful to address the emotional part as well - and this is, what a reward model should do. It should reward participants for their achievements, thus motivate them to stay and do more. There is no doubt, that improving language skills is a big reward on itself, but, in our hearts, we are all little kids, that want to get some candy from time to time.

 

It's a nice feature of virtual worlds, that these candies can be realised quite simple. A simple way to stand apart from the crowd is an optical difference. For example the color of a students’ hats could change according to their reputation gained in the learning community or they could wear a shirt with some text on the chest; they could have another title (floating above their heads), or some special equipment.

 

In the Avalon-courses we use reward models for several reasons:

  • We want to experiment with reward models: What works well? What doesn't? This is an important information that we want to deliver during the trainer's course. 
  • We want to make the best possible usage of what virtual worlds offer for teaching. Having well-motivated students is a very important point in our project.
  • We want to create a positive memory in the participants. They should 'anchor' some positive experiences with their participation in the course.
  • We want to make our courses "visible" - also outside avalonlearning-island (which is useful for dissemination)
  • For some courses we want to create a competitive environment e.g. the businss course, the debating course
  • We want to promote reward models as an integral part of each course design in a virtual world. Using a reward model forces the course designer to think about how the student's achievements can be measured and against what goals. This will go into the design principles that we teach in the trainer's course.

 

 

 

Methodology

 

 

General Approch

 

When introducing a reward model into a course several issues must be considered:

  • The type of students: What are they intersted in? What would motivate them best?
  • The objectives of the course: The rewards must be strictly tied to the course's objectives, in other words, students that get a reward should have aquired some of the skills that the course designer had in mind. There is the potential that the dynamics of a course change in an unexpected and undisireable way as soon as the rewards become adapted by the student's community (e.g. students trade rewards amongst each other instead of winning them on their own; students specialise in certain fields, where they get most rewards).
  • The budget: Rewards often cost money - there must be a budget for it.

 

 

What to give a reward for?

 

Normally a course has a primary goal (e.g. improving fluency and self-confidence in business situations), but beside that, there might be other dimensions, that are important for the success of a course, thus should be rewarded as well. Good examples are social skills (e.g. teamwork), technical skills (mastering the environment) or creativity.

 

 

Whom to give a reward?

 

Part of this question is classical grading: A measurement-process is needed that maps achievements to rewards. It should be comprehensible and fair.

 

With a good set of criteria, we can (ideally) track activity and progress of each participant.

 

Depending on the course (goals), student level and trainer resources some of the following criteria might be used for assessing language skill (for each criteria, there should be a qualitative description of what the assessment's meanings!):

 

  • Successful communication: How was 'the message' delivered? Subcriteria: fluency, self-consciousness, manner of appearance
  • Complexity of used language:
  • Correctness of the used language: Subcriteria: grammar, wording, pronounciation, spelling  (in case of written assignments), ...
  • (Preparation / Homework)
  • Effort
  • Contribution

 

The model should be flexible enough to reward very individual achievements, e.g. "special award for the best presentation ever given by someone who thought he could never speak in public"

 

 

What reward?

 

There are 2 main kinds of rewards:

 

1. tangible rewards

  • money: either in the virtual world's currency or real money
  • real life items, e.g. textbooks, amazon-vouchers
  • virtually world items, e.g. Avatar's equipment, Bablefish-translation tool, skills

 

2. intangible rewards

  • status
  • benefits
  • permissions

 

Which awards to choose depends on the institution, the budget, the community and the characteristics of the used virtual worlds.

 

 

Avalon's approach

 

What to give a reward for?

 

Each language course has to decide on its own what to reward, but one thing is sure: We definitly want to give awards for technical skills. This shall help us to form a community of future Second Life tutors We consider this being a very motivating award for a student to reach a status where s/he could earn real money - by tutoring other students.

 

Whom to give a reward?

 

We are very much in favor of finding a special award for as many participants as possible. This reflects the general approach of being lerner-centric, thus treating each student as an individual.

 

What reward?

 

Possible tangible rewards include:

  • free space on Avalon-island
  • free language lessons
  • Linden$
  • Gold,  Avaloneuros (an own currency that can be spent in 'the village', e.g. the pub or the store)

 

Possible intanglibe rewards include:

  • a monument or board of honor in a 'hall of fame' or the village plaza or infront of the business barn
  • upgrade in status / more permissions on Avalon-island

 

The status could be reflected by group membership and/or title, thus students would be promoted from their default state("Avalon tourist" or "Avalon student") to maybe ...

  • Avalon Enterpreneuer
  • Avalon Ambassador
  • Avalon Cyber / Geek (technical)
  • Avalon Mediator (social)
  • Avalon Scout
  • Avalon Handyperson
  • Avalon Roadie

 

 reward model - related article  

 

 

Comments (2)

Mats Deutschmann said

at 1:48 pm on Oct 5, 2009

I would also include something about being graded an 'expert' and entering a pool of potential personell resources. I am personally very keen to establish such a pool for pure practical reasons and I am sure that others might be too.
Mats

klaus said

at 8:49 pm on Oct 7, 2009

Definately, Mats - you are talking about the "social dimension" which is refered in the deliverable description

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