Establishing Reward Structures in Online Classrooms
In the first installment of our 3-part how to gamify your online class series, we explored ways to create themed classes from fiction. This second article outlines ways to establish creative reward structures online to increase student participation.
1. Score counters & virtual rewards
In Project ID’s recent Young Educators Challenge (YEC) Bootcamp, we put in place a reward structure to reinforce positive student behaviour. The system was simple — for every act of positive behaviour exhibited, a point was awarded to their team .
For instance, a team was given points if one of the members performed an act that was inclusive i.e. asking a fellow student to share their opinion/thoughts.
The team with the most points at the end of Bootcamp was given a choice to select from any of the 4 available rewards. Points were tracked and displayed using an interactive Google Sheet with + — buttons and a simple bar chart. At intervals, we would show the chart to prompt/ remind students that participation matters.
2. Reward cards
A game we have enjoyed using in our workshops is a PowerPoint version of Jeopardy. Jeopardy is fundamentally a simple quiz game, where participants gain points for answering questions of varying difficulties. When the question is answered incorrectly, the participants lose all their points.
In Project ID’s conflict management workshop, active students were rewarded with ability cards that gave their team special advantages during the game. The reward cards serve to give students a stake in the lesson and in turn, keeps them engaged. In hopes of keeping this article focused, we’ll talk about how to go about creating games like Jeopardy on PowerPoint in our future articles — stay tuned!
In your classes, these cards could practically contain virtual rewards of any form — so feel free to get creative with your rewards and let us know what you come up with!
3. Virtual badges
For teachers teaching asynchronously via text on WhatsApp or Telegram, the challenge is communicating scores and rewards frequently enough to still excite students while not completely cluttering the chat with screen captures.
Customised WhatsApp stickers are a fun way to capture attention. i.e. the best student each week gets a sticker of themselves made. You can even get other students to make their own stickers using the WhatsApp Sticker Maker app! Check out some examples from our Student Outreach Team below. Short, condensed gifs/clips can also act as badges that you give out when students display positive behaviour.
Remember, rewards don’t always have to be tangible. Sometimes, simply giving students the choice of how they want to learn is good enough incentive. The goal is keeping your students engaged and learning. Games and points are simply a means to an end.
In the next article, we explore interactive web-platforms that you can use to increase the fun factor in your lessons. Click here!
This article was written by Alexander Khor, a Programme Associate for Project IDwith the research and support of Ang Chiew Teng, a Programme Lead for Project ID.
Project ID is an education social enterprise that runs high-impact programmes empowering students to lead self and others with 21st century skills. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Project ID has run over 70 online workshops with more than 1600 student participation across Malaysia.
