What a difference a few years can make!
We’ll be honest: when we first launched EMC² Learning in March 2021, we weren’t exactly sure of just what we were getting ourselves into, or how big this whole thing would turn out to be. What we did know is that between us, we had a shared love of playful pedagogy, upwards of 30 years of teaching experience, and had published three books about classroom gamification and gamified course design. And over the years, we’d each developed a pretty respectable collection of tools, tips, tricks and resources that helped us bring the power of play to life in our classrooms.
And when COVID-19 shut down just about every avenue for traditional professional development, we decided to put our heads together and set to work on creating the platform that now stands before you today.
Armed with little more than a rudimentary knowledge of WordPress and a whole lot of free time on our hands, we spent much of the 2020 lockdown months taking meetings, teaching ourselves coding and web design, and migrating a massive collection of just over 200 resources onto this platform to help lay the foundations of this pipe dream project that we envisioned as sort of an “academic Disneyland.” Full of life, creativity, wonder and excitement with each new addition — our vision for the site was that, like Disneyland, it would never truly be complete. And if our dream was to turn into reality, then perhaps our playful alternative to traditional PD might just end up serving as an online happy place where passionate teachers everywhere could enjoy all kinds of resources designed to help them make meaningful shifts to creating more student-centered, feedback-focused classrooms for learners of any age.
Fast forward two years, and our playful professional development platform has grown exponentially, with an impressive library of over 500 gamified teaching resources and counting! As of today, we have roughly 579 resources available on the EMC² platform — and each one is fully editable for any course or content area. But we’re not stopping there! To celebrate our second birthday, we’re kicking things into high gear and setting our sights on eclipsing the 600 resource milestone in high style. And over the course of the entire month of March, we’ll be adding 30 brand new resources to our library, each carefully designed and curated to meet the highest standards of our world class teachers and the ever changing needs of 21st Century students.
Whether you’re a long-time user or a new visitor to our platform, we’re confident that you’ll find something to love in our ever-expanding library. Our resources are created and tested by real, live, experienced educators with a passion for playful pedagogy (not to mention a willingness to put in a ton of behind the scenes legwork), and every activity on the site is fully editable so that you can customize it to meet the unique needs of your students.
If you’re a new fan or a longtime supporter of the EMC² Learning community, thank you for your inspiration and encouragement at each step along the way for these past two years. We are thrilled to do this incredible work alongside of you, and honored to know that we are helping to play even a small role in the awesome work you do to bring the power of play into classrooms all around the world.
And if you’re new to the site: we’d love to have you join the fun! We’ve got 30+ resources in the pipeline for the next 30 days alone… so now is the perfect time to get in the game!
EMC² Learning is home to more than 500 fully editable resources for any course or content area. Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps enjoy a full year of access to each of these resources on demand. We hope you’ll consider joining us to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.