Serious games in post-secondary education, an opportunity for the curriculum and the 21st century skills development

Games are often associated with childhood and unconditional playfulness; the use of games as learning artifacts in post-secondary education is still limited. Games can be powerful tools for learning, offering complex learning systems to the learners (Prensky, 2006), a participative interaction with the learning content to the students (Aldrich, 2009) and providingrisk-free environments to explore (Kirriemuir, & McFarlane, 2004) that could be integrated into the curricula of primary, secondary and post-secondary education. According to Ott, Popescu, Stanescu and de Freitas (2013), Game Based Learning (GBL) could be integrated into the curriculum, to contribute not only to achievinig specific pedagogical objectives linked to educational subjects but also to the development of the 21st Century skills. Post-secondary education should combine both the traditional learning objectives curriculum and 21st Century skills in order to prepare learners for future job market needs. Collaboration, communication, ICT literacy and social and cultural skills are the main skills recognized by the different 21st century skills frameworks (Voogt, & Pareja Roblin, 2012). Digital computer based games can effectively contribute to develop the ICT skills of learners/players, especially in situations where the learners are engaged in the co-creation process of the games through computer game-making authoring tools such as Scratch (Hayes, & Games, 2008) or MAGOS (Kiili et al., 2012). Moreover, the use of serious games in collaborative learning activities could contribute to developing collaboration, communication and social skills when the game is pedagogically integrated into the curriculum to promote these social skills. Serious games can also be profitably used in the field of entrepreneurship education to help students acquire an entrepreneurial mindset, sense of initiative and specific entrepreneurial skills (Bellotti et al., 2012), which also are considered key competencies needed by those wanting to be leading actors in the Knowledge Society (Gordon et al., 2009). Not only individual serious games played in collaborative learning settings in the postsecondary classroom but also Massive Multiplayer Online (Serious) Games (MMOGs) could be integrated into the post-secondary curriculum for achieving the most important 21st century skills. The presentation will introduce some case studies of serious games that could be used in the context of post-secondary education and it will also put forward some ideas and opportunities for developing new serious gamesthat could contribute to developing skills for the 21st century.