VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOM TRAINING

6 October 2022 – A short training on an online platform was conducted on Wednesday 5th October 2022 by the newest addition to the pool of talented staff in the Centre for Modern Languages (CML) – Dr. Umi Kalsom Masrom, who has been in the education industry for 12 years already.

The two-hour session was hosted by the Head of Foreign Language Department, Dr. Wan Jumani Fauzi and she made the session light and relaxed. Two hours passed very quickly but all the participants learned a lot.

The training was attended by both the UMP staff and students, particularly those who are also the trainers and facilitators of the CML Virtual Summer Camp team. The training was aimed to generate new ideas for the Virtual Summer Camp as well as to inspire the participants to think outside the box for teaching.

The training was centred around the use of the Genially app to create interactive and stimulating online games and activities that can be used for language classes. This is indeed relevant as most of the activities planned for several of our recent virtual summer camps which had to be conducted online through various platforms due to the COVID 19 pandemic which has transformed the education scene.

Dr. Umi Kalsom patiently led the training step-by-step by firstly asking the participants to play a simple yet challenging game called Escape Room which was basically based on a movie with the same name released back in 2019.

In the ‘pregame room’ stage as the prelude, the participants were asked to read a scenario and a brief instruction that would help them understand the game better. The participants were then asked to help ‘Simon’ solve his problem in the game to find the clues to crack the password.

Though simple, it was a challenging task for the participants who had to scroll all over the picture to search for the clues leading to questions that they had to answer one by one in order to get the password.

In the next stage, she briefed the participants on the basics of Genially. It was the first time any of the participants had heard of this platform! The participants learnt how to use the basic functions of the app during the training session. They were given ideas on how to use the Genially platform to create stimulating games and activities using the basic functions available there.

In addition, she also shared some tips and tricks in creating games and activities using this remarkable platform. This is to ensure that they are really meaningful and not too burdensome for the game players. In general, all the participants managed to learn something new during the short training session.

Hopefully, this could help with the English language enrichment programmes in UMP as we are also moving towards Micro Credential courses, apart from having introduced Substitute Blended Learning, which we are still in the midst of fine-tuning.

Anyway, language teaching and learning activities should be conducted through various interactive platforms so that the learning process is exciting for both the students and instructors.

We just can’t wait for the training sequel, which is the physical Escape Room Workshop that is scheduled for 9 December 2022. Imagine how enjoyable and engaging learning can be when we put more effort into our planning and teaching design. Done Genially 101. Genially is indeed genial!

Prepared by: Khairul Amri Abdul Aziz and Dr. Wan Jumani Fauzi