Level up! Utilising gamification to engage faculty in professional development courses in an Anglophone Caribbean university.

Michelle Stewart-McKoy

Michelle Stewart-McKoy

The UWI Quality Education Forum

2023

27

GamificationFaculty DevelopementAnglophone CaribbeanHigher Education

77-107

Globally, there has been renewed interest in faculty development strategies to improve the pedagogical competencies of faculty, an outlook which is paralleled in the Anglophone Caribbean. Yet anecdotal and empirical data emerging out of the recently concluded Professional and Organization Development (POD) 2022 conference held in Seattle, Washington, reinforces the uptick in a plethora of faculty development practices. An increasing number of scholars and faculty development coaches have been bemoaning current delivery practices and have been calling for better and more effective strategies for faculty development initiatives, chief among which is gamification (Steinert and Mann 2006, Tobar 2020, Yilmaz et al. 2023). In order to determine the extent to which the addition of game design elements could support faculty development activities, game features were incorporated into the asynchronous aspect of a faculty development course and was piloted with fifteen facilitators in a Caribbean university. Select game mechanisms were interwoven into the learning experience based on the participants’ game-playing profiles. Although more comprehensive research that transcends a small pilot is needed, the initial findings are encouraging for bolstering faculty development activities, minimising academic ennui, increasing faculty engagement and allowing faculty to break free of and inevitably advance beyond the academic malaise of information dispensation.

Published