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Beyond Gaming: The Potential of Twitch for Online Learning and Teaching

Published: 26 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Twitch is a live streaming platform that was originally designed for gamers to share their gaming experiences. The viewer culture on Twitch supports a lively exchange between streamers and viewers and also among viewers themselves. While the potential of Twitch for game tutorials and instructions has been explored, its potential for university lectures still appears to be undiscovered. In this paper, we discuss the potential of Twitch for teaching. We ran two different courses on Twitch, one for CS beginners, the other a game development course for students in a master's program. Evaluations with students show Twitch benefits, including increased engagement and interaction in chat and the ability to watch videos directly afterward. On the other hand, we also discovered several challenges, such as in-chat spam by bots. In this paper, we would like to discuss initial experiences from different perspectives and discuss best practices. Our aim in doing so, is to help other teachers decide whether Twitch might be a suitable online learning platform for their course.

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  • (2023)Gamification in Live Streaming Platform: A Systematic Literature Review2023 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICoICT)10.1109/ICoICT58202.2023.10262457(569-574)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2023
  • (2023)The phenomenon of online study rooms in the days of COVID-192023 IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE)10.1109/EDUNINE57531.2023.10102815(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Academic performance prediction associated with synchronous online interactive learning behaviors based on the machine learning approachInteractive Learning Environments10.1080/10494820.2023.2167836(1-16)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ITiCSE '21: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1
        June 2021
        611 pages
        ISBN:9781450382144
        DOI:10.1145/3430665
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 26 June 2021

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        Author Tags

        1. Twitch
        2. live learning
        3. online learning
        4. streaming
        5. video education

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        View all
        • (2023)Gamification in Live Streaming Platform: A Systematic Literature Review2023 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICoICT)10.1109/ICoICT58202.2023.10262457(569-574)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2023
        • (2023)The phenomenon of online study rooms in the days of COVID-192023 IEEE World Engineering Education Conference (EDUNINE)10.1109/EDUNINE57531.2023.10102815(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2023
        • (2023)Academic performance prediction associated with synchronous online interactive learning behaviors based on the machine learning approachInteractive Learning Environments10.1080/10494820.2023.2167836(1-16)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
        • (2023)Implementation and Experiences of a Flipped Lecture Hall - A Fully Online Introductory Programming CourseLearning in the Age of Digital and Green Transition10.1007/978-3-031-26876-2_79(832-843)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2023

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