This guide will help you think through detailed logistics and your own personal philosophy around grading and assessment structures. We estimate that it takes 3-4 hours to work through the structure of a single class, plus the time to create the necessary support materials.

Step 1: Define learning objectives

Creating your learning objectives from the beginning gives you a better understanding of what goals you have for your students and will allow you to make assignment choices that match those goals.

If you want to see what makes good learning objectives, start here.

Step 2: Decide Autonomy method

There are many different ways you could introduce autonomy into your course. Here are a few examples:

Autonomy through submissions:

Step 3: Think through unlocks and badges

In many games you can’t fight the boss until you have finished off their underlings. Your gameful course can be set up in the same way. Using a gameful learning management system, like GradeCraft, allows you to set paths for students to follow through your course. GradeCraft also allows you to create badges for various actions in your course that can be used in the unlock scheme.

• Using unlocks in GradeCraft
• Why you might want to use badges in GradeCraft

Step 4: Determine your assessment approach

Next, you’ll make a few decisions about how you’ll grade assignments. In gameful courses, we walk instructors through decisions in each of the following areas:

• Using rubrics. Using rubrics ensure your expectations are transparent to students. Some instructors say this is a time-intensive process, but it’s often a one-time investment that saves time during grading.
• Allowing resubmits. Allowing students to resubmit assignments gives them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. This makes if safe for students to take risks on assignments that are outside their comfort zone.
• Allowing choices. Having a lot of assignments is another way to help students recover points if they need to. To keep your workload under control, consider breaking up larger assignments into smaller components. 
  • For example breaking a research project into several parts (hypothesis, proposal, draft, final paper and presentation), with each step graded separately. 
  • Using an unlock system you could even have later components locked behind successful completion of earlier components. This allows students to get points for the progress they make even if they decide not to finish the paper or give a presentation.
• Allowing students to self-assess. Research on self-assessment shows that students are quite accurate when it comes to reviewing their own work. This approach can help reduce the total grading workload for instructors, and create opportunities for students to be guided to think about their performance in a new light. With transparent expectations students can really examine if the work they did meets your expectations and reexamine if it doesn’t.

Step 5: Set up assignment type

List the types of assignments that will be included in your course. For example:

• Course Example 1: Videogames and Learning
  • Class Attendance
  • Reading Quizzes
  • Blogging
  • Learning Game Reviews
  • Learning from Playing a Game
  • Boss Battles
  • Grading System Quiz
  • Team Competition

• Course Example 2: Intro to Political Science
  • Attendance
  • Readings
  • Discussions
  • Blogging
  • Boss Battles
  • Group Project
  • Conventional Academic Essays
  • Scribing

Make sure that your assignment type titles are clear so that students can understand what to expect from each assignment type.

Step 6: Create assignments and assessments

Step 7: Set achievement levels and grading scale

Next, you’ll set the number of points students need to reach for various achievement levels.  This scale can be anything you want: you can use traditional letter grades or labels like “master, expert, moderate, novice” and so on. The numbers on the scale are completely arbitrary; what matters is that students feel a sense of progression and understand what how to make progress toward their goals.

Need some inspiration? Consider these examples:

A. Match level names to hierarchies that are relevant to your course content – students learn while they level up.

B. Create a leveling system that helps students see themselves make progress long before they have earned a full letter grade.

C. The number of points between levels does not need to be consistent. The farther up this point scale, the larger the gap, making the ‘game’ feel progressively harder as the student builds mastery.

D. There is no need to use the full grading scale. This course chose not to include F or A+. You could also forgo any letter grades until C- since that’s the pass criteria.

Step 8: Assign Points

It may be unconventional to assign points after creating all your assignments, but now you have the full picture of your course, including the assignments and achievement levels, which will allow you to be more purposeful with point distribution. The points values you assign can incentivize (or decentivize) students to do certain assignments. 

For each assignment, consider whether it’s formative or summative.

• Formative work is generally intended to monitor students’ learning on a topic like reading quizzes or short blog posts.
• Summative work is intended to evaluate students’ learning on a whole unit of content.

Typically, summative assessments are worth more points in an assessment scheme because students are expected to do a variety of work to learn the materials in preparation for them. However, there are moments where we explicitly incentivize formative assessments — for instance making reading quizzes valuable in order to get students to do the reading. There may also be moments where we devalue summative assignments to make lower their stakes.

Other things to consider:

• how frequently this assignment will occur (weekly assignments are probably worth fewer points than ones that occur only once)
• how much work you expect students to put into the task

Sum up all of the points for the assignments you’ve listed.

• To help foster the freedom to fail, we recommend your assignment total be at least 150% of your A level. For example, if it takes 12500 points to get an A in your course than your assignment point total should be 187,500.
• If your total happens to be less than your A level, adjust your points or adjust your levels.

Step 9: Review and launch

Review your course with some of these questions in mind:

• Are you enabling students to show that they have learned material through a variety of media? Can you add assignments that would allow this and work towards your learning objectives?
• Are you enabling students to make choices about what advanced content they will work on such that they can customize it to match their unique interests and goals?
• How are assignments distributed across the semester? We recommend looking at the workload week-to-week to make sure that the course isn’t so backloaded that no one is able to make progress until the very end of the semester.
• Do students have control over when they do work, enabling them to balance your course against their semester schedule? Many instructors have certain categories of assignments due at different intervals throughout the semester to stagger the grading and discourage students from procrastinating.
• Are there distinct assessment pathways that involve a progression of content or skill acquisition? You might make these explicit by using unlocks to declare that completion of one is required to move on to the next.
• Do you anticipate that some students in your course will come in with a high level of knowledge on the content already?

Launch! When everything looks ready, you can launch and run your course. While you run your course, try to get meaningful feedback from students to help you iterate (Step 10).

Step 10: Iterate

Take all the feedback you get during your term, look through your design, and make whatever changes you feel are appropriate to achieve a balance between challenge and motivation. Try to think of running your course in the same way gameful pedagogy thinks of assignments: we hope you feel like it’s safe to fail and try again.