Contented: Choose Your Own Adventure!

You wake up with a shock in a pitch black room. How did you get here? Although you can’t see a thing the room feels cavernous and drafty. In a panic you decide to stand; unfortunately you bump your forehead painfully  on a cold, hard surface inches from your face as you attempt to climb to your feet. What do you do next?

• If you decide to lie there and cry: Turn to p. 6
• If you decide to wriggle around and blindly explore the space: Turn to p. 8
• If you decide to use your magnificent echolocation powers: Turn to p. 16

19th Century Lithograph by Alexander ver Huell

Many of us grew up voraciously consuming these types of branching stories as books, hyperlink-rich webstories, or interactive Youtube adventures. Surprisingly – and delightfully –  this type of narrative multiplicity also has a rich history in education (think game-based learning). In short, a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) design involves multiple possible pathways through a learning experience. Today I’d like to briefly focus on the benefits and challenges of implementing a CYOA design philosophy. Here we go!

Benefits

Student Choice: In a perfect world every class would be designed, redesigned, ripped apart, discombobulated, and made whole again using student feedback before, during, and after the semester. Unfortunately, this iterative, pseudo-democratic ideal is rarely possible in the day to day realities of higher education. CYOA experiences allow students at least some choice – if not control – over their own learning trajectory.

Multiverse Storytelling Potential: Both students and professors can benefit from the narrative potential of CYOA degree, course, and assignment design. Here are a few examples from the student perspective:

• CYOA Degrees: A la carte degrees give students the opportunity to construct a personalized journey and control the narrative direction of their own lives. A well-designed CYOA degree offers an unlimited combination of educational adventures.
• CYOA Courses: Branched-design courses involve varying degrees of student-initiated narrative path making. For example, a sociology course might involve 3 main assignments with 5 choices per assignment. These choices might only vary in type of media produced by the student (video, paper, speech, painting) but they could also diverge in content, amount of interactivity with others, or a variety of other factors. Although some students will inevitably have the same path through a CYOA course, each student chooses a path for very personal reasons. Thus, each student constructs a unique story throughout the semester.
• CYOA Assignments: Occasionally, the CYOA script is flipped and students are required to create open-ended projects. For instance, literature students might choose a short story from class and create 3 alternative endings. U.S.  History students might create a short film depicting a significant event with several possible endings based on conflicting evidence. A potential benefit to students here is an enhanced ability to hold and consider multiple and conflicting narrative possibilities.

Challenges (and how to overcome these)

Student Choice: Many new undergraduate students already feel overwhelmed with the plethora of choices laid out before them. CYOA design can contribute to this “anxiety of plenty”. Fortunately, this potential pitfall can be lessened through standard course and assignment design techniques including detailed course and assignment descriptions, rubrics, and scaffolding.

Increased Design Time: Creating multiple alternative assignments (or course designs or program paths) is obviously more time consuming than crafting a single document. The key to overcome this challenge is to take on a “borrowed enthusiastically” mindset. In other words: Use what already exists. For instance, do your colleagues have alternative assignments that that would be willing to share? Does MERLOT, OER Commons, or other Open Educational Resource repositories include materials that you could incorporate into your own course design?  

Grading Burden: Realistically, CYOA assignments and courses can create a heavy grading burden on the professor. After all, it can be mentally taxing to switch between multiple types of assignments. Fortunately, this burden can be lightened by 1) creating structured analytic or holistic rubrics for each type of assignment and 2) formulating a peer-review process for some assignments. I also recommend introducing CYOA design into your course a bit at a time – see how it works for one or two assignments and continue to iterate your design in the future!  

For More Information and Inspiration