The Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference is my favorite professional development to attend! This year I had the opportunity to moderate a panel session with some truly amazing people, Alex Pickett, Director, Online Teaching at Open SUNY; Andrew Shean, Chief Academic Officer at NUS Online at National University System, and Doug Geier, eLearning Director at Golden Gate University. Fortunately for me, they were willing to indulge my desire to shake things up.
The Idea
This all started because I had the opportunity to serve as Chair of Presenter Services for OLC. Doug and I connected through this as he was serving as the Engagement Chair that same year. (Chair of PS reports to Engagement Chair) We had been working to build Presenter Services from the ground up and we realized that if we were making recommendations for the conference presenters on giving great presentations, we should probably have a session at the conference and a plan to make it something awesome.
We decided to take a traditional panel session and gamify it. And I can honestly say, I felt like it was one of the best sessions I have ever been a part of! If you’re interested in reading our conference proposal to see what we actually submitted, you can read my post “OLC Proposal: Innovation, Collaboration, and Leadership”
The Process
Ok, realistically this was a bit of a technology challenge. But in the end, everything came together smoothly. In order to make everything work, we needed two laptops, each of the ‘contestants’ needed a phone, we needed a tablet/phone to manage the contestant’s responses, and we needed voting software so attendees could rate the contestant’s responses.
To briefly describe how we did this. We created a list of pre-determined questions and loaded them into Slido and the attendees could upvote the questions they were most interested in hearing responses to. The contestants would buzz in after each question was asked. The first person to buzz in received one point. That person then had a limit of two minutes to answer the question. After they finished answering the question, the remaining contestants also had two minutes to provide a response to the question. Then the attendees would vote on the best response. The person who received the highest audience rating received a point. This provided contestants with the ability to obtain two points per question, which worked out really well.
The Result
As I mentioned previously, I felt this was one of the best presentations I have ever been a part of. We had a lot of fun, the audience loved it, and we provided some really great information to our attendees. We received amazingly high ratings from our attendees and our session was the highest attended panel session at the entire conference!! Several months after the conference I was still receiving positive feedback from people who attended our session and later connected with me online. This was such a great experience and I can hardly wait to give our next gamified presentation!