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Schools are to prepare students for success. However, they often villainize failure. Instead, schools should teach students how to fail fast and safely in order to learn and to allow innovation through vulnerability. The lessons that the gaming culture has for learning will define future strategies of teaching and learning. Games are sometimes called well-designed work. As a result, people flock to them. The secret of engagement in games can be adopted in academia as soon as courses become well-designed games.

Using technology in teaching and learning finds a wide adoption in recent years. 63.3% of chief academic leaders surveyed by the Babson Survey Research Group confirm that online education is critical to their long-term strategy. Modern engagement pedagogies, such as digital gamification, hold a promise of shaping student experience. While course builders and instructors investigate new technologies and teaching methods questions arise about the instructional quality of academic courses with online content or with gamification elements. In addition, students are not the digital natives many hoped them to be. 83% of millennials report sleeping with their smartphones, but 58% have poor skills in solving problems with technology. This paper reports on a gamefully designed course, delivered in a hybrid modality, which was selected through a peer review process as an exemplary course in consideration of instructional design. The course was evaluated according to the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program rubric. Gamification was introduced in three phases: player onboarding phase, player scaffolding phase, and player endgame. Various technologies involved in the course included: MyGame gamification mobile app, Blackboard Learn, Cengage Skills Assessment Manager, Kahoot, Amazon Alexa, Google Traveler, Twitter, and others. The course focused on gamification according to the short and long game theory to engage students during lectures (short game) and throughout the semester (long game).

This paper addresses the concern of educating diverse university students in an increasingly digital environment. Specifically, educators question the quality of student online research skills and how to address gaps in research skills in both the virtual and physical classroom. A 2012 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with College Board and the National Writing Project found of the 2,492 teachers surveyed, 94% stated their students were very likely to use Google search engine as their first source when conducting research for an assignment, rather than traditional sources such as university subscribed databases. The vast majority of teachers surveyed stated the top priority in the classroom is teaching students how to assess the information they find online, how search engines work and how to develop strategic research skills. These findings highlight the discrepancy between how students currently access information and how professors teach students to access information (Purcell, et al., 2012). This problem is important to address because as Ferrario, Hyde, Martinez, and Sundt (2013) found in their independent study, professors must adapt their teaching pedagogy to the new digital age to ensure future student success.