Interfaces and services for integrating games and game components into competence based courses within learning management systems

Abstract

Development of an educational game that can be integrated into a course within a Learning Management System (LMS) is a challenging task both from the didactic and from the technical point of view. A thorough evaluation of students' playing performance on LMS-side requires informative user-specific data that have to be collected during gameplay and then transferred to the LMS. Standardized interaction technologies like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specify mechanisms that can be applied for implementing functionality to exchange students' competence profiles and traces. The Knowledge­Management Eco-System Portal of the European funded RAGE (Realizing an Applied Gaming Ecosystem) Research and Innovation Action project provides capable components, assets and related utility packs for developing such functionality: besides a toolkit for creating competence based games that meet the requirements of Qualifications Based Learning (QBL), assets for storing individual player profiles and traces are available. Furthermore, tools for creating game-specific analytics are provided that can be embedded by LTI-compatible LMSs like Moodle. This paper is concerned with the integration of QBL-compliant competence based games into LMS-courses. A major topic is the description of an exemplar Moodle-plugin with its required functionality and interfaces to the above-mentioned RAGE assets. As the approach is not yet implemented, this paper remains on a conceptual level.