Conference Agenda

Teaching academic skills as part of a politics degree is often a challenging task with both student engagement and attendance key issues to overcome. Solutions to these issues, such as integrating academic skills training into pre-existing taught programmes and content that have a compulsory and/or assessed element have often been perceived as the only viable route to improve engagement with this important area of a students life cycle in Higher Education.

This paper argues that this solution is not the only pathway to achieving effective student engagement and learning with academic skills and may in fact undermine some of the key attributes of academic skills, such as genuine reflective learning. Based on the design and evolution of a non-compulsory academic skills course that ran alongside pre-existing programme content, as well as two years data on engagement and feedback, it establishes that academic skills teaching in a politics degree can be effective if designed and framed around a teaching technique that combines both humour and political scandal.

The paper argues that students engage with academic skills content when it is made directly relevant to their perceived purpose in studying a politics degree and that this initial engagement can be reinforced by the careful use of humour in establishing real-world relevance to the academic skills they are being introduced to. This semi-reflective paper makes the case for a student centred approach to teaching academic skills that challenges the move towards generalisation of ‘skills’ within Higher Education.

A constructivist approach to education traditionally requires the use of problems. This allows students to explore the knowledge that they have on the subject and it allows them to reflect on the knowledge that is still missing. This approach also lends itself well to the development of soft-skills through role-play, unfortunately, studies on the impact of role-play on education are rare. In this paper, I will discuss the development and testing of a game that I developed specifically to improve in-class participation. The paper uses the Collaborative Problem Solving Framework in order to identify key obstacles to in-class participation and gamifies those obstacles. For instance the degree of variance between perceived competence amongst students has shown to cause to free riding, to combat this obstacle the card game instructs highly confident students to give factually incorrect answers, and it requires less confident students to correct these students. It is theorized that practicing these types of interactions will challenge students and help them develop positive outcome expectations in relation to expressing their opinions. The main hypothesis that will be examined in this paper is whether soft-skills can be improved through role-play and whether those improvements lead to higher grades. This paper will be built on the theoretical foundation of Problem-Based Learning as it was adopted by the University of Maastricht and the Collaborative Problem Solving framework.

For the reviewing committee: I can also provide interactive workshops focussing on educators playing the game.

Gamification is known to be a recognised method of managing business companies’ personnel performance and motivation. In modern Eurasian countries this practice is now gaining popularity in universities. Despite criticism from the advocates of traditional methods of education, the scale and variety of gamification methods and means introduced are slowly incorporated into the curriculum even as obligatory teaching practices.
This paper presents the set of results of the experiment of introducing gamification practices to teaching International Politics and International Relations in Armenia, Tajikistan and Russia in 2018 - 2024. Gamification was applied as an additional method of teaching and evaluating (including mid-semester tests and course exams at the end of it) to both graduate and undergraduate students, studying such subjects as History of International Relations (2d year of BA studies), International Security (3d year of BA studies) and Peace Research (2d year of MA studies).
In this paper, I introduce two blocs of methods and practices that were applied. First, I discuss how the semester exam in each of the three cases was divided into 3 stages with a choice for students to take a full- or partial exam using a “take-home exam” method that is still not widely recognized in Armenia, Tajikistan and Russia, and the results of this experiment. Second, the paper discusses the application of a role-play “Royal Diplomacy: Justice Revisited” with an open-ended decision and some game theory practice that were applied for graduate students. Also, I highlight the major problems with student motivation, group performance successes and failures, and some psychological-cultural issues that were revealed as obstacles or accelerators during this study experiment across three universities in these countries.