Daniel Hoppe and Garrick Ducat of Mercy College presented on the use of humor for engaging students.

Benefits to laughing in the classroom

Garrick began the presentation by noting that there isn’t a lot of research out there about using humor to support learning. The biggest problem facing students is high anxiety. Humor helps diminish that. Humor also helps with retention of knowledge.

Daniel described a healthcare marketing class that was facing some challenges in motivating student creativity. They hoped to make a change to increase student retention and comprehension. Instead of the typical “talking head” video to introduce a section, Garrick had another idea. They would parody of NBC’s The Office to create engaging and humorous videos.

Instructional Design: Finding a way to meet a learning objective

The goal of Daniel and Garrick’s project was to develop a learning resource that could demonstrate how certain marketing concepts are applied by showing situations students could relate to and easily interpret.

Their process:

• Use a team approach (to ensure humor and concept involved has wide appeal)
• Work with instructor to figure out the core concepts involved
• Have brainstorming sessions
• Develop character personalities
• Write the script
• Select cast members

Dan’s character was modeled after Michael Scott and Garrick after Jim. The important thing was to model the humor dynamics between different kinds of characters.

To write the script they did not want a long video. After about 15 minutes “students are gone.” They also wanted to be able to deliver it over the web using their school’s streaming server.

Leading up to shooting they had script readings to help people get into character. Ad-libbing was encouraged for some emergent humor.

They shot video for about an hour and took 3-4 hours to edit the footage. (Mike sez: This is quite fast for a video project!)

The video itself was hilarious and I hope they post it publicly so I can link to it. It was quite funny!

Assessing Learning

To assess learning they used a combination of the following:

• Journal Entries
• Quizzes
• Synchronous Chat
• Marketing Projects

The journals didn’t quite give them the feedback they needed. While student feedback was positive it was more in the form of praise for the humor of the video (“Hilarious! I showed my wife!”). To supplement the assessment effort they had quizzes to demonstrate knowledge retention. Additionally there were two synchronous chats for each module. Finally there were marketing projects to give students a chance to demonstrate their learning.

Dan said after they implemented this approach that the student projects were the highest quality he had ever seen.

Mike’s take:

Dan and Garrick did a phenomenal job not only entertaining us, but also by describing a clear process for creating engaging videos. They discouraged boring, long lecture style videos that mainly feature a “talking head” and encouraged creativity.