Gamified Learning

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Benjamin Franklin.

In an earlier post, the question of using gamification as a means of learning was posed
In another earlier post, knowledge bases were discussed.
And in a third post, the concept of an OSS apprenticeship was proposed.

In today’s post, let’s discuss a product concept that merges the three together.

In any new OSS implementation, your staff will take time to get up to speed, often a lot more time than people realise. The Pareto Principle tends to apply here. 20% of “experience” will allow operators to cover 80% of issues. But that means the other 20% of issues require a whole lot more experience. These less common issues obviously occur less frequently, which means you have to wait a long time for learning experiences to occur.

But if you develop a knowledge base of outlier events that have occurred historically, you have the compressed content that can be used to train your OSS apprentices. Better still, you have the content that also has context within your network (ie naming conventions, familiar devices/topologies, etc) rather than just generic data.

Finally, you need a gamification engine that allows you to simulate and/or play back past events for the apprentices to discuss and attempt to resolve.

Alternatively, you might seek to simulate the most common events to bring your newbies up to a functional level quickly.

So what would this product need?

Offline versions of toolsets and databases as well as production-like data
The ability to easily record key events for posterity. Note that knowledge bases tend to fall out of repair if the content development process is too complex. As such, an analytics engine that can strip key events out of past data would be even more ideal than having manual cause-effect data creation
Knowledgeable resources who are able to determine the real cause-effect of the situation
The ability to play back these events, through the off-line toolsets if possible, or more simply, through a video player
The ability to turn this into a game situation where scoreboards compare participants and introduces competitive tension

December 21, 2013
Ryan

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