Societal changes demand educators to apply new pedagogical approaches. Many educational stakeholders feel that serious games could play a key role in fulfilling this demand, and they lick their chops when looking at the booming industry of leisure games. However, current toolkits for developing leisure games show severe shortcomings when applied to serious games. Developing effective serious games in an efficient way requires a specific approach and tool set. This article describes the EMERGO methodology and generic toolkit for developing and delivering scenario-based serious games that are aimed at the acquisition of complex cognitive skills in higher education. Preliminary evaluation results with case developers using the EMERGO methodology and toolkit and with learners using EMERGO cases are presented.

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Abstract-In collaborative learning environments, students work together on assignments in virtual teams and depend on each other's contribution to achieve their learning objectives. The online learning environment, however, may not only facilitate but also hamper group communication, coordination and collaboration. Group awareness widgets that visualise information about the different group members based on information collected from the individuals can foster awareness and reflection processes within the group. In this paper, we present a formative data study about the predictive power of several indicators of an awareness widget based on automatically logged user data from an online learning environment. In order to test whether the information visualised by the widget is in line with the study outcomes, we instantiated the widget indicators with data from four previous runs of the European Virtual Seminar on Sustainable Development (EVS). We analysed whether the tutor gradings in these previous years correlated with the students' scores calculated for the widget indicators. Furthermore, we tested the predictive power of the widget indicators at various points in time with respect to the final grades of the students. The results of our analysis show that the grades and widget indicator scores are significantly and positively correlated, which provides a useful empirical basis for the development of guidelines for students and tutors on how to interpret the widget's visualisations in live runs.

Background. The EMERGO method and online platform enable the development and delivery of scenario-based serious games that foster students to acquire professional competence. One of the main goals of the platform is to provide a user-friendly authoring environment for creating virtual environments where students can perform authentic tasks.Aim. We present the findings of an in-depth qualitative case study of the platform’s authoring environment and compare our findings on usability with those found for comparable environments in literature.Method. We carried out semi-structured interviews, with two experienced game developers who have authored a game for higher education, and a literature review of comparable environments.Findings. The analysis shows that the usability of the authoring environment is problematic, especially regarding understandability and learnability, which is in line with findings of comparable environments. Other findings are that authoring is well integrated with the EMERGO method and that functionality and reliability of the authoring environment are valued.Practical implications. The lessons learned are presented in the form of general guidelines to improve the understandability and learnability of authoring environments for serious games.

Multiuser immersive learning scenarios hold strong potential for lifelong learning as they can support the acquisition of higher order skills in an effective, efficient, and attractive way. Existing virtual worlds, game development platforms, and game engines only partly cater for the proliferation of such learning scenarios as they are often inadequately tuned for learning. First, this study aims to identify architectures that more effectively support the development of multiuser immersive learning scenarios. Second, this study takes up the challenge to define and assemble more flexible architectures that cater for fast and easy development, which will become important in the current period of economic breakdown. Third, this study describes how such architectures should enable research into guidelines for multiuser immersive learning scenario design and development. This study outlines a method for defining and setting up such architectures by using experts and existing literature.