Designing for the Casual Learner

The semester just started, and I have been thinking a lot about how my students actually experience my class. I have always gamified the structure in some way, with progress reports that include boosts, power ups, and achievements. At the same time, I have told students they could ignore the confusing parts if they wanted to. This semester I went further and built three different versions of the report: Simple, Default, and Advanced. In other words, they can now choose whether to see the game at all. I am curious how many will pick the stripped down view, and how many will dive into the dense, color coded system that tracks every boost and bonus objective.

That choice made me think about a bigger tension in teaching. With a traditional mindset, we tend to assume that the "right" way to experience a class is the complete way: do the readings, watch the videos, join the discussions, and move through the whole map. We do not like shortcuts, because shortcuts feel like skipping the point. This is part of why generative AI feels so threatening. It is the ultimate shortcut. Students can have a bot summarize the reading, or even draft a response, and suddenly all the carefully sequenced design seems irrelevant.

But what if we stopped treating shortcuts as failure and started designing for multiple kinds of play? When I play a video game, I am a casual gamer. I move through the story, enjoy the world, and never bother collecting all the trophies. Other players are completists, tracking down every secret and grinding every stat. Who is better? Neither. If the casual gamer enjoys the game and the hardcore gamer does too, then both are playing "right." The point was never to check every box. It was to engage.

Why should learning work any differently?

Maybe the student who devours every reading, chases every bonus objective, and fills their progress report with shades of green will walk away with the richest version of the class. But maybe the student who takes a more casual path, skimming here and there or using AI to get through the material faster, still walks away with something of value. Not just a grade, but genuine learning on their own terms.

This is not about lowering standards or accepting lazy work. It is not about letting AI write assignments. It is about recognizing that there are multiple valid paths through the same set of learning objectives.

AI has not created shortcuts so much as multiplied them. Students were skimming and half watching videos long before ChatGPT came along. What AI really does is expose the rigidity of our assumptions about what learning should look like. If classes are designed like games with only one right path, then shortcuts feel like cheating. If classes are designed as spaces where multiple paths are valid, then students can engage at their own level of intensity and still get something real out of it.

I like thinking about my class as a game for exactly this reason. Not because everything is gamified, but because games remind me there is never just one way to play. The question is not whether students are engaging "correctly." It is whether they are learning. And if we are serious about multiple pathways to learning, then we need to think harder about what that actually looks like in practice.