Ed tech's gamification problem
Ever feel like you’re making easy progress learning something online on an app but after a few days you completely blank out when you need to apply that learning? At the same time, do you still remember some of the toughest lessons you learned from the teachers you hated in school?
This happens to me a lot. One day I’m acing tests online — blazing through lessons and scoring perfect marks. And then a few days later, I make a complete fool of myself trying to apply my lessons.?
No, your memory hasn’t gotten worse with age. Neither is this a random phenomena. Turns out there’s a science to this paradox. In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world, journalist Daniel Epstein explains this well. Online learning these days is a lot about giving hints and cues so that the learner progresses.?
Designers and product folks call it gamification and many of India’s ed tech firms take inspiration from games to good effect as they build their product for learners. It has its advantages. But like most things, it comes with a problem too.?
While gamification ensures that more people use a learning app and stick to it for longer, it may not be the most effective teaching strategy. Epstein points us to the story of a study by psychologists Nate Kornell and Herbert S Terrace, that was done on Oberon and Macduff —?two monkeys trained to learn lists.?
Oberon and Macduff were asked to respond to lists of photos in an order. They were allowed to request hints for some lists and on other lists they had to depend only on memory to generate the correct order of photos.?
Kornell and Terrace found that “Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.”?
That is, if it’s learned the hard way, it sticks. “Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information,” Kornell and Terrace wrote in a paper that was published by Psychological Science in 2007.?
Nothing wrong with getting some help here and there. But progress, Epstein notes, shouldn’t happen too fast or you’ll end up like Oberon or Macduff, with a “knowledge mirage” that doesn’t help when it matters the most. “It will produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.”
So the shiny new app that you or your children seem to be doing so well on may not really be helping you truly learn even as it gives you a sense of confidence.?
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Building the AI tech stack at Adaptiv.Me, a Gen AI platform to help global youth in upskilling and employment.
3 年This is a correct analysis in isolation but things have to be seen in context. Edtech is now competing for attention more than ever with everything else that children (and other learners of different age groups) are doing. Specifically for young learners, gamified and dopamine driven experiences are everywhere. This is a generation that knows the internet as one big feed of 30 second videos. In that context, edtech needs to reinvent itself to make sure learners stick on the platform first, before it can make learning happen. Bear in mind that for those who want to learn there is no dearth of choices or content. Gamified edtech platforms are not solving for the top 7% who are motivated learners but the remaining 93% who are likely to drop off, get distracted or simply not be motivated beyond the first failure. While I agree that over gamification and over simplification can lead to a false sense of learning, what really needs to happen is to build the right game layer - where as learner stickiness increases, the level of challenges and complexity increases and so does the reward. This is a complex problem involving Instructional Design, game design and Product Ux to work together. Edtech in India and globally will need to rise to this challenge - this is the only way forward for education.
Marketing Head | SDA Bocconi Asia Center | Higher Education | On Deck Fellow
3 年Pretty intense thoughts, when the whole world is headed towards gamification leading to gratification. I fail to understand why we never pay heat to the “approach” or rather “training to think”. And thanks for recommending the book!
VP - Product & Growth | Multiple 0-to-scale journeys scripted | Bet 14 years of career on Human Capital potential | Parent of 4 boys - 1 human and 3 cats - with Sonali
3 年Very thought provoking which is why I believe MOOCs (Udemy, Lynda) and many learning platforms such as Duolingo don't work, and the more serious ones such as SimpliLearn make an impact
Great post!
Consultant - Civil/Structural Engineering [CEng, MIE, MICI]
3 年Thought-provoking!