MOOC and Serious Game: An Educational Approach on Transfer and Action

(“Open and distance learning – MOOCs”, O.Bernaert, R.Crepon, L.Dhorne SEFI2015 conference, Orléans / France, 07/02/2015)

O.Bernaert’s presentation: 
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As an application school in engineering for the energy and transportation sectors, IFP School launched its first MOOC on November 2014. In this paper, we describe how the school challenged the current practices with the design and implementation of a Serious Game over a period of three weeks of the online course. This pedagogical innovation facilitates knowledge transfer through situational learning. Indeed, the Serious Game allows the learners to put their knowledge into practice and to face situations they would face in the industry in their future careers.
The paper is organized in two parts. First, we review the main steps of the project: the educational objectives, the instructional design, the content development, the Serious Game usage and the learners’ qualitative feedback. For its first edition, the MOOC has a 31% retention rate on the total number of registered people, a high score considering that the average completion rate for a MOOC is around 10%. According to the MOOC survey, the majority of users considers the Serious Game to be the main positive asset of the course. In a second part, we discuss the characteristics of the Serious Game as it has been implemented in the IFP School MOOC. In particular, we use typological studies on gamification and we conclude with the interest of gamification in an application school like IFP School.

MOOC and Serious Game: An Educational Approach on Transfer and Action