What Students Can Learn from Online Gamers

The problem: more learning resources are available now than have ever been in all of history, but we're not using them enough. This is not just a problem in relation to free education. Even people who pay thousands of dollars for their educations are engaging less in study (measured in hours per week). It's a deep problem that, in my opinion has more to do with internal motivations than anything else, not to be solved by meddling activists and certainly not a blogger. But for those people who do value learning, one stumbling block they are likely to find is that it's hard to maintain a learning habit without a social component. Some of us want to interact with other people who are doing the same thing we are, sometimes just for enjoyment, but also to help us solve tough problems and keep our interest high. This is where I think the gaming community can help us. For any fault we can find with online gaming, has anyone ever accused gamers of not being involved enough? For better or worse, players of massive online games have some of the most tightly knit and organized communities out there. How do online learners compare?

After I finished nursing school, I completed my bachelors degree online and one of the first things I tried to do was interact with other students. I invited classmates in every class I "attended" to join me in online study groups. The response rate was nearly 0%. I was surprised, honestly. Here were a bunch of people learning to (it seems) improve their ability to perform as nurses, in some cases to save lives, but they didn't seem interested in the possible benefits of working as a group. In fact, they seemed to want to get by with the bare minimum that it took to achieve their degrees. When I played video games, I experienced the exact opposite. People put in as much as a full time job, organized themselves like a military unit, and never called in sick. Why were gamers so much more involved than students?

In any massive online game, above the game itself is a meta game. It's about maintaining social cohesion, tracking progression, rewarding contribution, and gaining status in an imaginary world. Serious guilds have an involved core of officers and a structure that supports the guild's progression. It's a pile of powerful motivators acting to keep people playing the game and keep the group competitive. I think that those same motivators can be used, at least partially, to help us in other endeavors, like learning. Here I'd like to bullet up a few key areas in which a learners guild could keep learners involved.

• Keep it social
  Friends keep people coming back. Check in often, even just to socialize.
• Maintain Requirements
  There must be a minimum required effort to be in the group. If no effort is made, no progress is made.
• Reward with Status
  Reward participants who make progress (finish classes, assignments, meet the schedule) with honors and titles.
• Be Selective
  Not just anyone can be part of the group. There must be a process of recruitment that weeds out less desirable students.
• Challenge Always
  The group should always push the boundaries of what it can accomplish.
• Create Positive Identity
  Carrying the title of the group must be a mark of pride. This ties together a couple previous elements as this pride is gained when the group succeeds and those successes are displayed to the rest of the world.

It's not realistic to think that we can make online school just as fun and motivating as World of Warcraft, but there's no reason to believe that we can't at least do better than the nothing we're doing right now. A group of people taking a class together is an improvement. A group of people who progresses through multiple challenges together, learning to work together and play together, motivating each other to do better than they've ever done before, that's a guild. That's a group of people more likely to succeed at anything.