This is a guest post from scholarship recipient Bethany McGowan, a member of the Design for Learning community.
I attended the 2017 American Library Association Conference, June 22-27, in Chicago, IL with funding from a D4L scholarship. My goal for the conference was to learn more about incorporating gamified learning into online courses and to complement what I learned in the D4L program with experiences from other librarians. I was happy to find that several sessions met my needs, including two useful hands-on workshops:
Implementing Gamified Assessment and Badges: A Practical Guide, a hands-on workshop that taught participants to use gamification for instruction and assessment. It highlighted the gamified assessment tools Kahoot and Quizzizz.
Keywords to Mastery Game: An Active Learning Approach to Discover Research Topics, a hands-on, 50-minute workshop that allowed participants to design and play a game focused on teaching the keyword and natural language processing skills required to search databases.
There was also a session on improving online instruction, Visibility & Engagement: Design, Develop, or Refresh your Online Instruction.
In addition to learning, I had time to socialize with the D4L at ALA group over pizza dinner, where I met several new colleagues.
After completing D4L and attending ALA, I am very interested in strategies for designing and developing Open Education Resources (OERs) that librarians can use for continuing education, particularly OERs related to librarian’s roles in Open Science.
