The Great Game

of EducationUsing the Open Book Classroom to increase

student communication, transparency and

motivation@AndrewMatranga | @JiConf 2015

University of Denver | Media Film & Journalism Studies

● 2014 topic: Google Plus As/In the

Classroom

o Look at how well that experiment went…

Google Plus has gone the way of the

Dodo Bird, and we know how the Dodo

fared.

Update to 2014 Teach-a-thon

Background on Open Book Finance

Jack Stack and the SRC story

● 1983 - Springfield, MO: The demise of International

Harvester and the rise of employee ownership

● 2015: SRC Holdings Corporation operates 31 business

units including joint ventures with John Deere and two

venture capital incubator funds. And ~$500mil in sales.

● The roadmap? Open Book Management.

● Now Missouri Southern is partnering with SRC to create

the Great Game of Education.

o But I own the domain ;)

The Higher Laws of Business

1. You get what you give.

2. It’s easy to stop one person, but it’s pretty hard to stop 100.

3. What goes around comes around.

4. You do what you gotta do.

5. You gotta wanna.

6. You can sometimes fool the fans, but you can never fool the

players.

7. When you raise the bottom, the top rises.

8. When people set their own targets, they usually hit them.

9. If nobody pays attention, people stop caring.

10.As they say in Missouri: Shit rolls downhill. By which we mean

change begins at the top.

The Ultimate Higher Law

When you appeal to the

highest level of thinking,

you get the highest level of

performance.(From Jack Stack’s Great Game of Business)

From the Boardroom to the Classroom

1. Know and Teach the Ruleso Every student should be given the measures of academic

success and taught to understand them.

2. Follow the Action & Keep Scoreo Every student should be expected and enabled to use their

knowledge to improve performance.

3. Provide a Stake in the Outcomeo Every student should have a direct stake in the success, or the

risk of failure, in the class.

The Great Game of Business becomes the Great Game of Education

Basically it’s an accountability system and conversation about

our progress, as groups and as individuals. We’ll assess

ourselves and our work, both in celebration and in critique, with

the goal of constantly improving, in our Huddle, which is a

weekly status meeting to check in an update progress. The first

effort is rarely the best effort, and we’ll build on our experiences

and assignments. We’ll create a self-measuring system built

on shared learning outcomes, and we’ll build key

performance indicators that help us reach those outcomes,

individually and collectively. You will base your scoring of

yourself, your peers and your instructor on our learning

objectives.

What is the Open Book Classroom

Basically, these Student Learning Objectives boil down to

five questions and how we answer them over the course of

the quarter: ● How you engage with the software and your peers.

● How you take initiative in labs and in the group projects.

● How you collaborate in discussions and in the group project.

● How you organize your files on your workstation, personal

computer and in Google Drive.

● How you use creativity through the software and your

own independent thinking. -From sample syllabus

Student Learning Objectives

Open Book Empowers Students

Instructor Cares About

● Lightbulbs

How can everyone share values?

Student Cares About

● Grades● Process

● Assessment

● Mentoring

● Deadlines

● Accuracy

● Learning

● Deadlines

● Credits

● Graduation

● Job

Open Book in Action

Tools

● The Huddle >

● Old Skool Whiteboard >

● Google Drive >

● Twitter >

● Storify >

● Learning Management System

Each class features a 15-

minute Huddle to discuss

news, class progress,

analytics and the week

ahead.

Goal: Catch up stragglers

and confront confusion.

The Huddle

Image: Zingerman’s

The Huddle and the Board in Action

Twitter Board in Action

Pulling Twitter Stats

Peer Reviews and Open Book

● Peer Reviews on Storify posts that

students create

● Still a work in progress, as students

need to learn how to use feedback

and give feedback.

● In short: It’s a story.

● In this case: Of the class and the students.

● Each person tells a story and shares the

story.

● It’s Agile Development meets the newsroom,

in a journalism lab setting.

● Runs on a whiteboard, Twitter, Google Drive

and Canvas.

In Sum: The Open Book Classroom

Comments? How’s my driving? Holler back...

Next Steps

Transition student

newspaper to Open

Book Finance...

For The Win.

Thank You #JiConf 2015

@AndrewMatranga

greatgameofeducation.com