April 2nd, 2011
LRND 6790 Thesis Critique
I chose to critique the thesis that I did for a couple reasons. First of all – I wanted to review a thesis produced from the BGSU Learning Design program. Having the same courses and foundation as the author, I felt I could easily relate and dissect the thesis effectively. Next, I wanted to review a thesis that studied implementing an educational game, as I am still on the ropes about incorporating one in my own study pertaining to training franchisees.
You can find my thesis critique here.
You can find the full thesis text here.
Good critique, Wes. I agree that the author did a good job with the literature review and making a case for the significance of the study. Like you, though, as a reader I found myself wanting to see a little more of about how the game worked in action. (Links to the actual videos from which the screen shots were made might have helped me.) I also had some questions about the game design. I can see a multiple forced choice “choose your own adventure” type game working well for training on “objective” things like policies and emergency procedures, but am less sure about effectiveness in “fuzzy” situations like mediating conflicts between students. (Might a guided “role playing” game in some kind of social environment be more appropriate and feel more authentic to player/learners, I wonder?)
I hope this gave you some ideas about things you wanted to do and not do in your own study. I suggest scavenging the references section of this thesis, too. There’s some good stuff here, and it’s certainly fair game to do so provided you’re still doing your own synthesizing and critiquing.