Videogame University

The Problem: Online courses are expanding, but students sometimes miss the community-building that happens in a physical classroom. Also, we’re used to using our computers in independent, interactive ways, which can make it hard for students to sustain attention in an online classroom. Full-class discussions are difficult.

The Solution: Using methods honed in videogames, create a vast virtual world where students can explore their interests, learn from teachers and from each other, and earn college credit.

Beginning the Game: Your subscription to Videogame University is paid for this semester, and you can start playing!

The first levels, which are largely automated, take you through the process of creating your avatar, building your house, and meeting your neighbors. Your house is pretty empty right now; you’ll earn decorations as you take more “courses.”

The game takes you through the process of setting your learning objectives, which are displayed prominently in your house. You decide you want to earn a B.A., but you’re not sure whether you want to major in Psychology, Poli Sci, or English.

Like many videogame worlds, you interact in real-time with other players through their avatars. To start, you’ve been randomly placed in a community with 20 other “freshmen.” You chat and get to know them and look through their houses. If everyone in the community makes good progress towards their learning goals, the community as a whole gains extra awards, so there’s an incentive to make sure everyone’s playing regularly and getting help if they need it.

Reward Unlocked: 101-Level Portals Open!

Your 101-Level Classes: You travel through a portal to vast compounds; the equivalent of courses in different disciplines. At the compounds, you wander where you wish, finding interactive puzzles and games which introduce you to the conceptual frameworks of different disciplines.

In your Psych course, you interact with NPCs who are acting out the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and answering some simple questions unlocks a few videos of psych experiments. In your Political Science course, your avatar is swept into a lesson on Marx as you solve puzzles about the means of production. In your English class, you begin an interactive journey where you learn about different theories of critical reading and then apply them to texts.

Reward Unlocked: Group Message Boards Open!

In the Group Message Boards, you can get immediate help on any puzzle that’s got your stumped, read walkthroughs and tip sheets created by other students, and generally experience a heightened level of peer-to-peer learning. All Group Message Boards are moderated by Sages.

The Sages: You encounter many people on your wanderings. While some of the first puzzles are automated by the game, as you gain more and more experience, you will increasingly need Sages to complete your tasks. Sages, in real life, are professors and PhD students with a deep knowledge of the subject and administrator privileges, and thousands of them roam through the game, holding impromptu classes, answering questions, and pushing students to think about their topics.

In the English compound, you meet a Sage who you like, whose schedule is compatible with when you usually play the game. She tells you that you can unlock English 202 if you write her an essay about Jane Eyre using one of the critical perspectives you’ve learned about in the game. In real life, you read Jane Eyre, regularly meeting with your Sage and her small group of followers to discuss and analyze the novel. You write your essay, which is read by your Sage and the rest of the “class.” (It’s fairly common that particularly rich videogame worlds lead to reading and writing outside of the game.) You revise your essay based on their comments, and…

Reward Unlocked: English 202 open!

“University Town”: let students do all the college’s work

The Problem: It’s hard to find good internships during college.  Similarly, it’s hard to hold down a job and still get schoolwork done. Different aspects of college are disconnected from each other.  Students have very little idea where their tuition money goes.

The Solution: Run a full university town from scratch.  Involve students in all the jobs and careers that exist in an university town. Save money (with all of your internship labor) and prep students for careers.

University Town: Where Every Building is a Classroom

Your little town has been built on an abandoned stretch of land, so there are no townies to displace. Your engineering students go to work expanding the town and building more buildings, getting concrete experience (aha) in the work they’ll be doing after school.

The English majors spend part of their coursework designing the college’s marketing materials, while communications majors run the admissions office and front desk. Finance majors work on the university board, learning to allocate spending, while pre-law students handle all necessary disciplinary actions and violations of community codes.  Culinary arts students run the school cafeterias, partially relying on food which agricultural students grow on the university farms. Meanwhile, pre-med students handle the bulk of work at the student health center.

All students work under supervision of experts and professors and their work is still graded, but motivation to do well also comes from the practical, immediate implications of failure. Mandatory seminars each semester, led by seniors, help students theorize what it means to run a community together.

The college, fully utilizing its mountain of free labor, is able to keep tuition costs low. Due to the uniquely interactive nature of the education, the university quickly becomes highly selective, and the (undergraduate) admissions counselors are able to admit the balance and quality of students which the community needs to become ever more self-sustaining.

You graduate from university town in a ceremony you helped plan with your PR major, and go on to a bright future doing a job you already know how to do.

Bare Bones University: Just the Basics!

The Problem: University tuition is high, leading students to endure years of oppressive debt.

The Solution: Just keep the essential parts of the university, turning all of the budget to good teaching.

Change this into that:

Dining Halls –> Variety of restaurants and food trucks (which will flock around your campus anyway).

Gym –> Local area gyms, offering student discounts.

Dorms –> Apartment buildings offering a variety of competitively-priced housing options.

Fancy Science Labs, Music Performance Facilities, etc. –> Minimal amenities, plus increased internships and cooperation to give students experience at local science labs, hospitals, orchestras, art studios, etc.

Summers Off –> Alternating seasons off, reducing number of students overall at any given point and allowing for smaller classes.

Tenured Faculty with Research Requirements and Sabbaticals –> Full-time teaching faculty, paid a decent wage, with generous and consistent contracts.

TAs –> Upper-level undergrads, working closely with professors, take on some additional grading and tutoring duties in exchange for free course credit.

Marketing brochures, etc. –> Low-cost internet advertising, with an emphasis on Craigslist.

What about it? Did I just invent the community college?

Death Class and Love Class

Problem: Academic categories are sometimes hard for students (and teachers!) to relate to their lives. Courses can feel pointless and esoteric.

Solution: Curriculum based on the main universal topics–death, love, life, and so on.

The Real “Death Class”: A professor teaches a popular class about death at a New Jersey college. The class brings together anatomy, field trips (to cemeteries, morgues and crematoriums), creative writing, in-class grieving, and understanding how death works in our society.  The class is very popular.

What impressed me most about the piece was the clear value the course had for students taking it. Without being therapy, the class helped grieving students overcome their grief. Without it being too much to handle, the course seems to help correct a social imbalance, our mass unwillingness to think about or talk about death.

Correcting a social imbalance, helping students cope with the world–if this isn’t the purpose of a liberal arts-based education, then what is?  What if all of our courses directly, concretely helped with the bigger questions in life?  Wouldn’t that be value-added for our students?

Your Curriculum: You’re a freshman college student. Your course load:

• Death
• Love
• Freedom

Each of your courses have a couple of TAs, who take attendance, grade assignments, facilitate discussions, teach writing and analytical skills, and know you very well.  The courses, truly interdisciplinary, are taught by a rotating spectrum of professors from the more traditional academic disciplines.

Your class on Love begins with solid dating advice from the counseling center to help you navigate the tricky first year of college. Health practitioners and sex educators come through to give you an understanding of the biology of love, while an anthropology professor discusses love as a cultural construct for a few weeks.  Of course, there’s plenty of writing, both creative and analytical. A English professor leads you through an analysis of the sonnet form, and a historian links courtly love practices to modern gender roles.  A psychology professor helps you understand the science behind first dates and pick-up artists. Death and Freedom similarly mix the curriculum.

At the end of your semester, you don’t like everything you’ve covered in your classes, but you like some of it, and you leave the semester with an increased ability to cope with the demands of the real world. After taking Death, your fear of death is decreased, you’ve discovered a love of anatomy which might lead you to med school, and you’ve worked through a lot of feelings about the death of your grandma. You have a better understanding of how your society works from your Freedom class, and you’re eager to make an informed voting decision in the next election. Your Love class has helped you get over a bad breakup with your high school sweetheart and launch a safe and enjoyable college dating life, complete with sonnets written to your new crush. All in all, you’re pretty well-adjusted for an 18-year-old.

You can check out the story I heard about the Death Class on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/19/263128996/death-class-taught-students-a-lot-about-life

And the book about it here: http://thedeathclass.com

Evolutionary Biology Knows Best

Problem: Some monkeys live in places with lots of resources and get along.  Some monkeys live in places with limited resources and they’re aggressive and competitive.  Our schools are often firmly in the “aggressive and competitive” realm, and train our students accordingly.

Solution: Use the lessons of evolutionary biology to reform the school system. Encourage pro-social behaviors by rearranging the spaces and messages of an environment to encourage people to act like their best selves.

This is the plan of David Sloane Wilson, Professor of Evolutionary Biology. I heard about this from an NPR interview by Krista Tippett on the show “On Being,” available at onbeing.org/program/evolving-city/4720

Much of his work centers around the ideal city, but he’s got a solution for eduction as well—10 features of productive environments that can be applied to the classroom.

Some of these, we already know are important without evolutionary biology.  The students have got to feel comfortable and safe, we have to reward harder work more (proportional costs and benefits), and there generally needs to be someone in charge, what Wilson calls “monitoring.”  We need to resolve conflict quickly and fairly, punishments should start gently and escalate as needed, and students need some kind of short-term benefit for their education—in other words, it’s hard to be motivated to write a paper tonight when the only benefit is the job they might get in six years. (An open question–did we really need evolutionary biology to know these things?)

Okay, that’s well and good.  The other four features of pro-social school environments are a bit weirder.  Consensus decision making—people have to be a part of how things are run.  Going along with that, there needs to local autonomy for groups, who have to be able to make their own decisions as to how their group runs.  But, with all these groups, you need polycentric governance, or coordination among groups, to make it all work.  And your social unit needs to have a strong group identity and a sense of purpose to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Your Volcano Assignment: You’re heading to your evolutionary biology-based high school science class.  Your whole semester has been organized around the quest to build the largest and most potent baking soda volcano. Your group worked on experimenting with different types and proportions of vinegar and baking soda, creating a need for chemistry research. Another group worked on designing the optimum shape, a group with more of a physics slant. A third group, with an applied science slant, worked on safety procedures and ensuring the minimum safe zone.  The teacher coordinates meetings between groups and provides resources (polycentric governance), but the individual tasks are set by groups and monitored by team members (local autonomy).  Your volcano is going to be set against other science classes (strong group identity, sense of purpose).

At the end of the semester, you trundle out your vinegar, your baking soda, and pour it into your ten-foot volcano, observing the safety precautions from the applied science group. As the volcano explodes upwards to the sky, we reach consensus decision making–because the consensus from everyone is that the volcano is awesome. 

30 hour work week + cheap lifelong school

Problem: Full-time jobs often suck. Many spend most of their lives doing unfulfilling work. We miss free time and intellectual stimulation.

Solution: Government-mandated 30 hour maximum work weeks, alongside cheap college classes for all ages. 

Your Life: You are now only allowed to work 30 hours a week.  Your company, grumbling slightly, hires more people, ensuring that more families are bringing in at least a little income.  Extreme poverty drops.  You get paid less, so you spend more time shopping for holiday gifts on Craigslist and other sites that recycle old things, contributing to a more environmentally-friendly society overall.  Your husband decides to start a vegetable garden in the backyard. You spend more time with your kids, helping them with their homework.  You aren’t burned out, so you take them to the park.  Our national health and intelligence skyrocket.

Your School: But even with all of the nice stuff in your life, you’ve still got some extra time after you finish up your shortened days at the closet design company. So you spend three hours a week going to any college classes you want.  You dabble in business, the humanities, plumbing…  You remember that in your grandmother’s time, people used to stop formal learning when they were 22.  Think of the fun they were missing out on!

Since you’re interested in what you want to study, you do well and learn quickly.  Colleges now regularly draw in people of all ages rather than focusing so heavily on the 18-22 year old crowd.  College enrollment stays high enough to relieve many of the financial pressures on universities, so they’re able to keep classes cheap and small.

Traditional degrees are a thing of the past, but if a subject really grabs you, you can earn various degrees of certificates by doing well in classes.  You find a love for French literature and gradually earn your “Black Belt” over many years.   You decide to get your certificate in Teaching Skills, and once that’s done, you begin to teach French literature.

Your class:

• A few teenagers who are going to backpack through France in the summer and want practice reading the language and understanding the culture.
• An elderly couple who have been gradually getting their Black Belt in French Literature over many years.  Now retired, they keep themselves sharp by expanding their studies.
• A book publisher who is hoping to expand into the international market.
• An investment banker who longs to stretch different mental muscles.
• A plumber who loves Alexandre Dumas and wants to learn more.

Finishing schools instead of college

“‘Of all the students in colleges today, a very large number should not be there.’ They are not interested in what’s going on there–except for the social life. Yes, college does offer a venue for the very necessary socialization process of 18-to-22-year-olds. But let’s admit that many colleges do little else FOR MOST OF THEM…” (Tom and Ray Magliozzi In Our Humble Opinion 251).

The Problem: Students in colleges are often unmotivated.  It’s hard for students and teachers to connect college to real life activities.

The Solution: Finishing schools (say, ages 18-22) become the standard, though the 10% or so of self-motivated students go on to study academic subjects.

Curriculum:  You are 18, and you enter Finishing School, like almost everybody else does.  You live in dormitory housing with several communal kitchens, and take classes in:

• Cooking (shopping, preparation, cleaning, food safety, budgeting, industrial and ethical concerns, and restaurant management)
• Preparing a budget (banking accounts, mutual funds and savings, issues of poverty and economic inequality)
• People (communication skills, networking, body language, psychology, foreign language and cultures)
• Computers (email etiquette, use of office programs, web design, coding)
• Health (sports, yoga, designing an exercise plan, mental health, meditation, the health care system, physiology, medicine)
• Home maintenance (cleaning, laundry, fixing cars, electrical engineering)
• Media (creating an online presence, job applications, marketing, close analysis of television, books, advertising)
• Society (different career paths, current events, government systems, cities)

As you progress through your career, you can begin to specialize in any skills or fields that appeal to you.  Finishing School is of course well-stocked with career coaches, and you begin to perform in mock workplace scenarios (so much better than internships!) with other students interested in similar subjects.  Writing and mathematics skills are specifically taught when they’re needed, not as a separate class, and the active Writing Center and Math Center provide both help and tutoring jobs to students with more of an academic bent.

The highlight of finishing school is the senior year Tour, where you spend three months in another city and learn about national and international cultures, languages, budgeting, apartment-shopping, making friends in new cities, and ways to find jobs.)

You graduate with a variety of life skills under your belt and a good sense of how the world works and how to work with different people.  You’re independent and confident–unlike some of our current 22-year-old contingent, you would never, say, bring your mother to a job interview.

That frees up your time during your first few years of work to really focus on developing the specialized skills you need.  You won’t be doing higher-level anthropology research and you’re a little shaky on Shakespeare.  Can’t have everything.