FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: Open Educational Game Framework and Platform
Suggested By: Maiga Chang
Last Update: March 19th, 2025

This research topic can be taken by either Essay, Thesis or Project route student.   This research topic will be co-supervised by Dr. Ahmed Tlili.   If you are a thesis or project route student, the certain project development tasks, usability study and/or further experiment for evaluation purpose will be included. The project outcome needs to be examined by well-designed experiment for quanititative and/or qualitative data analysis (for Thesis route student) and pilot testing for usability and technology acceptance analysis (for both Thesis and Project students).    Open Educational Resources (OER) are gaining an increasing attention from researchers, educators, practitioners and policy makers, due to their positive impact on learning. For instance, OER can enhance the learning content quality and facilitate knowledge sharing. Wiley mentioned five OER principles (5R), namely: (1) Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage); (2) Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video); (3) Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language); (4) Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new; and, (5) Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend).   Meanwhile, educational games are proved to be effective educational tools since they can enhance students’ engagement, motivation and learning outcomes. Despite the importance of the two fields (OER and educational games), combining them to obtain open educational games is still in its infancy.   Currently, no framework or guidelines are proposed for the development of open educational games. Therefore, this research focuses on reviewing OER and educational games fields in order to provide a solid framework of an open educational game platform. This platform aims to be capable of offering open educational games for both students and teachers. It also covers the five openness principles highlighted above by Wiley.    The student (no matter essay, project and thesis route student you are) is expected to investigate, via a solid literature review, the field of OER and educational games to provide: (1) The challenges of developing open educational games; (2) A detailed description of the educational game platform (functionalities, users, etc.); and, (3) A solid framework for this platform. This framework should consider several perspectives, including game design, learning and playing processes, data storing and exchanging, security, etc.   The potential students should have:   • [Required] Solid background and experiences of playing games   • [Asset] Good knowledge about conducting a literature review   • [Asset] Sufficient knowledge about OER   • [Asset] Good technical information and skills about data collecting and storing, standardization and API