As technology advances at an unprecedented rate and the job market continually evolves, educators are challenged with effectively engaging students and preparing them for success after graduation. The current landscape requires a shift from lecture-based, content-focused instruction to hands-on, student-centered techniques that foster lifelong learning competencies. Gamification provides an effective approach for creating exciting, active learning experiences that promote critical mindsets such as collaboration, problem-solving, persistence, and adaptability. These abilities are especially valuable for first-year students who are making the transition from high school to college research and learning. This article provides an example of how the authors have implemented Breakout EDU games to engage first-year students and help them develop skills and mindsets for success in college and beyond.

If you'd walked by Professor Susan Detwiler's Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) classrooms at the University at Albany-SUNY on September 7, you would have seen something rather unusual: two teams of students huddled around tables, preoccupied with locked boxes and an assortment of other materials. Engaged in animated, yet hushed, conversations to keep the other team from overhearing, the students puzzled over cryptic messages and secret codes, hoping to unlock the box and reveal what was inside. Some of the materials on the table provided clues, others turned out to be red herrings.The students were working with BreakoutEDU, 1 an immersive games platform. Building on the growing popularity of escape rooms, which challenge players to "break out" of their surroundings using clues and puzzles, this collaborative team-building experience can be applied in educational settings to meet a range of learning objectives.After attending a conference session about BreakoutEDU this past summer, Trudi Jacobson, head of information literacy, returned full of ideas about how it might be used to facilitate student learning. The idea was eagerly embraced by her two colleagues at a planning meeting for the fall semester's jointly taught class sessions: Susan Detwiler, member of the WCI faculty, and Kelsey O'Brien, information literacy librarian and liaison to the WCI Program. Coteaching modelWCI is a required seminar for first-year students, in which students learn the thinking, writing, and reading mindsets and strategies necessary for their academic careers and beyond. These objectives dovetail with the university's general education information literacy requirements, and so over the last several years, the three of us have worked closely together to strengthen students' research skills and deepen their understanding of how to engage in academic inquiry.At the center of both the WCI course and the information literacy program is developing students' practice of inquiry. As outlined by program standards, WCI students complete a sequence of three major assignments. First, they write to explore experiences or phenomena in the world. Then students write an analysis of a relevant issue or question that arises from the first assignment, incorporating scholars' interpretation of that issue or question. In the final paper, students write to join in the appropriate scholarly or broader conversation of that issue or question. This carefully structured sequence of Susan Detwiler is a member of the WCI faculty, email: sdetwiler@albany.edu, Trudi Jacobson is head of information literacy, email: tjacobson@albany.edu, and Kelsey O'Brien is information literacy librarian and liaison to the WCI Program at the University at Albany-SUNY,

This article examines metaliteracy as a pedagogical model that leverages the assets of MOOC platforms to enhance self-regulated and self-empowered learning. Between 2013 and 2015, a collaborative teaching team within the State University of New York (SUNY) developed three MOOCs on three different platformsconnectivist, Coursera and Canvas-to engage with learners about metaliteracy. As a reframing of information literacy, metaliteracy envisions the learner as an active and metacognitive producer of digital information in online communities and social media environments (Mackey & Jacobson, 2011;. This team of educators, which constitutes the core of the Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative, used metaliteracy as a lens for applied teaching and learning strategies in the development of a cMOOC and two xMOOCs. The metaliteracy MOOCs pushed against the dominant trends of lecture-based, automated MOOC design towards a more learnercentered pedagogy that aligns with key components of metaliteracy.

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