Interactive Storytelling, Gamification and Online Education: Storytelling Made Easy

Trevor Rasmusson
2017 International Journal on Innovations in Online Education  
This paper was created to stimulate thinking about the art of the possible in using storytelling for online education. We explore the possibilities for storytelling, visualization, peer discussion, gamification, and interaction as a learning paradigm. Written for educators and instructional designers/technologists, this paper provides concrete ways to engage in digital nonlinear storytelling at no cost by using open source software. A story provides a description and event or events. In the
more » ... itional worlds of storytelling, both oral and written linear stories are commonplace, often becoming the basis for books, papers, films, and television. A detailed description of both historical and contemporary storytelling is provided in Wikipedia (Storytelling, 2016) . In this paper, we are primarily concerned with a form of storytelling called "Nonlinear Storytelling" and specifically because we believe that a strong link in nonlinear storytelling with gamification can dramatically improve learning in online education. Others have cited that storytelling provides improved recall over simple presentation of hard facts (Gillett, 2014). While this paper is not a scientific study, it is hard not to believe this finding; we think everyone has experienced the ease of recalling a story as contrasted with a collection of disjointed facts. This paper is dominantly for online educators with little to no experience in digital storytelling. How educators can use stories, create digital stories, and disseminate stories to online students, while increasing the achievement of desired learning outcomes will be explored.
doi:10.1615/intjinnovonlineedu.2017018913 fatcat:jezcqc6v4rftbfzy4h7krupkgi