Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Elmir Insapov Uses All the Cards In His Favor | Episode 349

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Elmir is an eLearning Specialist at Catolica Lisbon Business School and a PhD Student at the University of Porto with five years of experience in higher education and corporate training and a proven track record of working with over 15 companies and universities. He creates gamified and action-oriented learning products that promote easy interaction and boost user engagement.

 

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Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, engagers, and welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And we have, all of our guests are very special, and I’ll let you know why. This guest of today, Elmir, is very, very special to us and to me in particular. But Elmir, we need to know before we get started, are you prepared to engage?

Elmir:
Sure, I’m ready.

Rob:
Elmir InSepOV, I’m not sure if I’m saying that even slightly correct. Is that okay?

Elmir:
Everything is correct.

Rob:
He is an e learning specialist at Catholica Lisbon Business School and a PhD PhD student at the University of Porto with five years of experience in higher education and corporate training and a proven track record with over 15 companies and universities. And he creates gamified and action oriented learning products that promote easy interaction and boost user engagement. And he is very, very special, at least to me, and I know to one of my past guests and co worker in this workshop that we do together, Bernardo, because Elmir was in one of those workshops and he was working through a fantastic project and it has recently come to fruition. He has tested it out. He has received feedback from his students. So we wanted to focus on these things today and of course, any and all experience that Elmir can have around these topics. So, Elmir, very quickly, is there anything that you’d like to share from your, you know, your day to day, what are you doing regularly? I know you were both a PhD student and also a learning specialist. So how do your days look like?

Elmir:
To be honest, like every day is very different. And my current tasks can be divided into three fields. So administrative tasks, creative and technical. And depending on my workflow, I do different things. For instance, on Monday I can mainly focus on video editing in premiere pro or after effects. And during the second part of the day, I can write and design a newsletter for professors on the next day, on Tuesday, for example, I have a lot of meetings about the proctoring system for the university. And after lunch I conduct training on moodle about, for example, how to use h five p and et cetera. And I finish my day by creating a structure for asynchronous electronic course. So, yeah, I have a lot of different tasks. It depends on my workflow and also, I don’t know. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have my PhD journey and in the evening I usually am writing my thesis and I try to increase my technical skills by learning unity. I can’t say that I’m doing well, but I do my best.

Rob:
Many, many things going on, for sure.

Elmir:
Right? Right.

Rob:
So, Elmir, we usually, we go for a question of failure at this point, but more than failure, and given your experience that what we’ve worked on together during the workshop, I would actually like to focus on your project in particular and a time or something that was difficult, something that was hard, something that was challenging. We want to be there. You know how you were going about this, what went wrong? If it went wrong at some point, how did you go about it? Solve it? Essentially, we want to live that story with you to see what are the lessons we can take away.

Elmir:
So, as you mentioned before, I came here as your student from PMD gamification training, and I’ve created a pitchable game. It was the name of that game that was a part of your course, and I applied this game at Catholic Lisbon business school. I don’t know. Before I tell you about failure, maybe I will give a little description of a pitchable game. What is that? For our audience to know what we are talking about?

Rob:
Absolutely.

Elmir:
So, pitchable game is a feigital board game. What I mean by fegital, that it includes physical and digital materials with a peer to peer concept. And the game is created for social and entrepreneurship course in which students create their own venture to present to real investors. So the pitch ball game helps them prepare for this real pitch. They present their venture to other students who are playing the roles of the jury, and after that they switch the roles. But the jury member roles are defined in advance, so students do not assess the venture of their groupmates in the way they want, but according to the role description and criteria they receive by drawing cards. Maybe it’s better to give just a short example. For example, you can be a jury member whose priority is feasibility of a venture. So you want a solution to be clear, well structured and feasible, and you ask questions keeping this role in mind. And after the presentation, all jury members decide the amount of investments they want to make and the team with the highest amount of investment wins. So about the failure. I feel that explaining the rules was not the best part of the game process. What I’ve learned from that is that after simplifying, rules should be simplified even more. After thinking that the user experience is great, you should review it one more time without trying to convince yourself that everything is already clear. For example, we created an animated video in after effects. This video explains game rules, and I sent this video to students a week prior to the game. But what I forgot about as a game developer, firstly, the fact that not all students will really open this video and watch 1 minute content. For example, today in comparison with Instagram reels or TikTok, 1 minute is a bit long, right? I don’t know if I would watch this video if I were a student. So I was just thinking about that a lot. And what should I do? Maybe create a better way of explaining these rules. Maybe we don’t need this video at all. Maybe we just need a, to create a short scheme with a good visualization. And in this situation, the professor of the social entrepreneurship course where we applied this game, Giorgio Cotter Salvador, really helped me a lot. He is very charismatic in the way that students listen to him. They trust him. So during the class, he explained the rules to students one more time and gave the student tips during the game. So thanks a lot to him. He really knows how to engage students. And because of him, I didn’t fail. I didn’t fail in explaining these rules. And what are we doing now? Now we are thinking about how to streamline the process of explaining the rules for other editions of the game. For sure. Like, we will simplify it, but what will be the final format? Like, it’s still discussable. If you have any ideas, I’m really happy to hear your piece of advice.

Rob:
One of the things I was hearing that, and I was just directly thinking the case study methodology, one of the things that you should have when you create a case is a teaching note. There are many versions of what a teaching note can look like, especially when you create a gamified environment or a game and that kind of stuff, especially for the debriefing side. And what does the instructor need to know that the student should not know, at least openly and that kind of stuff. So I think you were mentioning from the failure and how you got out of it that one of the big things for you was having very good professor who was capable of doing what he did, right. And it feels like sometimes it’s like, oh, if he were not there, then we would have not succeeded. So the question is, and I don’t have an answer to that question directly, but the question what might want to be asking is, how can we, right. How might we, is it the kind of design thinking phrasing of that? How might we, right. Be able to translate this experience to somebody else, to just one other? Right. And you think if he were to explain this to one other professor to do exactly. Well, not exactly, but the kind of thing he achieved, how would he do it? How would he achieve that level of success doing the explanation? And then when you’re able to explain it to one other professor, it’s easier to explain to other two professors, and then you turn it into whether a physical, well, physical written teaching note or something along the lines of what you were saying, an explainer video or whatever. You know, professors, we tend to be a little bit more lenient looking at a 1 minute video than maybe students, but that could be, you know, thinking along those lines. How would that even be possible? Is where you actually, I think, can get to solutions that are at least slightly more scalable if you’re to use this sort of internally in your, with other staff, so to speak.

Elmir:
It’s a great lesson for me in terms of like other gamification projects. So knowing the idea that the simpler the better, not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from practical one, is really great. So now I’m thinking like how to simplify maybe not only explainer, but all the rules of the game, how to simplify it, and after that, how to simplify the explanations. But what I’m thinking also about that we faced a challenge. I mean, like there was a challenge that we wanted to resolve on how to enhance the way students learn pitching skills, like making it more engaging without adding complexity. And so in this case, we took the regular model of peer to peer and added an additional layer of entertainment and roleplay. And when I mentioned simplifying, I already think that our model is quite simple. So maybe in this case we shouldn’t simplify the game process. Maybe we should change only the format of explaining the rules.

Rob:
Makes sense. It makes a lot of sense, and probably it solves the problem you were looking for. And then there again, it’s, you know, you don’t always get to think about everything, how it’s going to go right, how it’s going to go wrong. It’s about experiencing it as you did and experimenting with it as you also did. You realize, oh, I’m not able to do this way. So what is another way I can actually achieve those results I am looking for and talking about achieving results. How about we go for something that made you proud about this project, something that actually did go well. Again, the initial attempt or the end attempt, it doesn’t really matter. Again, we want to be there with you and take away some of those lessons that you had from creating your own project during and after, of course, the workshop that we shared together.

Elmir:
I don’t know. I have a very specific feature of my personality that I like to focus on some negative parts, but there were a lot of positive. So we received a great feedback, like the game was really great. Students were happy to participate and also they were really engaged. They really enjoyed the process and the overall net promoter score was high. And moreover, according to the questioner that we sent to them after the game, students really feel that they enhance their ability to effectively present their venture ideas to investors. So it means that we really achieved the goals that we set during creating the game. So, yes, the whole experience was really great, and I’m happy about that. And I’m happy that I participated on your training that really helped me to create this game and to achieve the results that are really inspiring.

Rob:
Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for your kind words. Elmir, I think you, I mean, the key, and I think I said this way too many times during the workshop, the key here is actually getting to do your stuff. Right. You, I show you the process that I use, which of course I will always think is fantastic because it’s the one that I use and I sort of came up with it with my experience. But beyond that, whatever process you want to use, you have to sit down, actually sit down and do it. Whether it’s the ideal one or not, you’ll figure it out along the way. I mean, there might be things you want to change. There might be something that does not work exactly how you were expecting, and there is where you can make adjustments. But if you don’t do that process, or for that matter, any other process, you’ll never figure that out. You’ll never know what it is that you were missing, what it is that you wanted to do that you could have done differently, and you’ll never be able to get to that level. So, cheers. Kudos to you for actually doing again the process that we discussed. But any other process works just as well because it is something that you need to put your head down and actually get to do the work. I can’t say that enough at this point because it’s the only way that you cannot learn. Just like we tell our students, right? We always tell our students, oh, you have to actually practice. You have to actually. Do you have to study? Well, it’s the same way here. Just that I’m not recommending you to study more. I’m actually recommending you to do this stuff. This is a doing kind of discipline, and I think you learned that in the best way, which is by actually getting to do it yourself.

Elmir:
Yeah, it’s true. And I think that it’s important to highlight that after your training, I changed the way I apply game based solutions. So before it was more about creativity in terms of creating wow effect and adding novelty. Now it’s more about better alignment of creativity and innovations with learning objectives, with metrics to measure and desired actions as a result. So I don’t mean that I didn’t use objectives before I used them, but now they play a bigger role and trigger any kind of changes.

Rob:
That makes sense. That’s great. And you were mentioning before the process, you changed some of the things I’m very interested in, because this is a question that we tend to get a lot, and I know you have a definitive answer, but I want to know how it went for you. There’s a difficulty that we tend to face because when you mention gamification, game, whatever, there is some resistance, especially in a serious setting like a university. There’s all these serious people, which doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be able to enjoy and see the value in all these things, but it tends to be a little more difficult for when you feel that you’re very, very serious about these things. So how was it for you to actually get this project approved as a project? Even get to go to the workshop itself sometimes can be challenging in some cases. How was that process for you? If you were to tell somebody else the story of how you managed to achieve this, which is already in and of itself a success, I would say, how did it go about for you? And again, if you were to recommend somebody else some of your ideas, what would that be?

Elmir:
So you mean how did I manage to get an opportunity to implement this project? Right?

Rob:
Yes, definitely.

Elmir:
So in this case, the answer is very short and simple. I just have an amazing boss. So I just ask her and she’s like, okay, Omir, just give me a game concept, I will find the professor and we will implement it. So that’s all.

Rob:
That was a quick one. That was a quick one.

Elmir:
It was really quick. No, but because really I’m lucky in terms of like, I work at learning innovation office and I’m lucky that, for example, the business school where I work, they always give me an opportunity to experiment with different concepts. For example, I got my master’s degree in multimedia and now I’m doing my PhD in digital media. And for example, for me it’s like extremely important to create some bow effects. For me, it’s extremely important to create something innovative. It’s not only about some pedagogical approaches. For me, it should be kind of juicy. And from this point of view, I love it. Yeah, but it’s true. It’s true. Because anyway, for example, when we create a content, educational content at the university anyway, we are competing with Instagram or TikTok, for example. If students are bored, in my opinion, they will never learn anything. It should be really juicy for students to learn. And in this case, thank you for my boss. Like every time when I have crazy ideas, even without justification, she supports me. This is the reason why I implemented the pitchable game at Catholicism and business school. And also, Rob, for sure, the Professor Giocotto Salvador, as I mentioned before, thank you very much to him.

Rob:
Okay. Thank you for your kind words. That’s definitely not what I was after, but yeah, I mean, having a boss that is supportive of these things can be a big, big, big difference. I mean, it seems like you said she, right?

Elmir:
Yeah, yeah. Jean Matape Pereira.

Rob:
Well, there you go. You even get a mention. Amazing. I love it. Don’t get me wrong. Also very supportive of everything that you were doing and that makes a huge difference. And sometimes we discount that. It’s like, oh yeah, well, it’s me doing the work and all that. And yes, well, that is absolutely true. It is also true that the support from upstairs, you might call it, or however you want to refer to the managers or the managing team or whatever, it makes a massive difference because it actually allows you to do that work that we are talking about. Otherwise, again, we might not be able to do many of those things all by ourselves. So cheers and kudos to you and definitely to your boss of the institution for being supportive of these things, for sure. Elmir, is there anything that we’re missing from that you might want to mention as well from that process and how you managed to get this through?

Elmir:
I feel that we discussed properly everything regarding the game that I created on your training, how I applied it in a real industry. Amazing. Do you have more questions?

Rob:
Yeah, no, definitely. I definitely do. Like, what I was going to ask next is in your case, as many of the things that I’ve worked on as well. One of the keys that I think you mentioned as well is that you had to work with a faculty member, right? Somebody who was there, I’m guessing from the content point of view. Does that make sense? It was the person sort of taking care of the depth of the content and the implementation later of the game. Does that sound right?

Elmir:
Do you mean that there were as a stakeholders who were responsible of creating content? Do you mean this?

Rob:
And you mentioned also the professor who helped you with the rules and all that?

Elmir:
Professor helped me. In terms of creating the storyline, I would say the concept of the game, the design and content creation was mostly on me. Also, as I mentioned, my boss. She also helped me with creating the structure of the game from the pedagogical point of view and also some of my colleagues.

Rob:
And how was that collaboration? Like structuring the team? I know, of course, since you were the one taking the training and you’re the ones for leading this, of course, you were sort of the leader, the coordinator, as you may prefer to call it. How was working with these different stakeholders, faculty members, your boss and other stakeholders in the university? How was that interaction? How did it go?

Elmir:
It was very easy. So, as you remember, everything started from your training. So I had kind of justification that the game I’m going to create is some real stuff. It’s not only my initiative. Yes. So after that, I collaborated with my boss in terms of creating structure. At the same time, I started collaborating with a professor. He shared with me the plan of his course with objectives, with other different information and taking. So I took that plan, I remember, and there was kind of, I tried to identify the players that are going to play the pitchable game. Do you remember? You explained me there were kind of disruptors, right?

Rob:
Yeah. That’s from Murciel.

Elmir:
Yeah.

Rob:
Yeah.

Elmir:
So as I remember, with this plan that I had from professor, I tried to identify the roles. Right now, I don’t exactly remember the role.

Rob:
That’s okay.

Elmir:
Yeah, but there were two. And like on the night, on the next class, we discussed it with you, as I remember, and with other groupmates who attended the training. So, yeah. And from that point, I just started creating a content and step by step confirming the content with the professor. By the end of, as I remember, April, everything was ready. We sent that video explainer to students and at the beginning of May, we conducted the game. And after the game, after the one week of the game, we decided to collect some feedback. We analyze it in excel file, my favorite part. So, and that’s all, to be honest, it was like, it was okay. It was not easy, but it was not something like frustrating, something I was exhausted about. It was funny.

Rob:
I would say, that’s great news. That’s great news. Because sometimes people might feel it’s like super, super challenging or something really, really difficult. And don’t get me wrong, it is work, it is hard work. But I don’t feel like it’s something that it’s, you need to be some kind of special. I don’t know, like we’re all special in our own ways and all that. Don’t get me wrong, but I don’t feel it requires something that was exclusive of these very different people. I think it’s a question of sitting down and putting in the work. So I’m happy to hear that it was also enjoyable, as you mentioned.

Elmir:
But also we were lucky because, I mean, like, I know some different softwares to create different types of content, video, audio, visual design. I had a professor who helped me from the pedagogical point of view. I had my boss who helped me with administrative point of view. So there were only three of us who participated, like, exactly. From the catalog business school, there were only three stakeholders. And also. Yeah, I think that’s all I amazing. I just tried because I had this moment, maybe there was someone else and I didn’t recall him. I’ll be ashamed after that. And I just tried to recall at the moment because I was not prepared for this kind of question about stakeholders. Like, I was trying to answer it immediately, trying to recall all the process, like that happened two months ago. I just want to say if there were some people that also participate in the game. Sorry, I just didn’t recall that. Sorry.

Rob:
It happens. It happens, and I’m sure it’s all going to be fine in that sense. So, Elmir, we have the final sort of round of questions that everybody’s familiar with. But before that, I just had one more sort of small thing. If there was somebody on the fences of taking, again, the workshop that you mentioned, we do it once a year, so it’s not even going to be closed by the time this interview goes out. So that workshop or any other workshop, is there anything that you recommend people that are thinking about taking a workshop on doing gamification or even thinking about doing gamification or not? Do you have any message for them?

Elmir:
Yes, sure. I have one. Like, do not set so large expectations for the first game you’re going to create. It’s better to create a small but high quality thing, then try to solve all the problems in one big solution. So I think that will be my piece of advice.

Rob:
Big, one big piece of advice. Love it. And completing all those recommendations that you’re already giving to the engagers, to the audience. Who would you like to hear interviewed on an interview on Professor Game podcast? Is there anybody that you’ll be curious about hearing?

Elmir:
Oh, it will be like after the story I told you about stakeholders and all the process of game creation, I think that it will be like a great idea for you to invite either my boss or professor with him. I created that game regarding my boss, Jean Mart Pereda, because we can discuss large scale, more strategic topics in the context of business education. And with Professor Giorgio Cottre Salvado, you can discuss more professional, more pedagogical stuff, I would say, in business education as well.

Rob:
Cool, cool. Then pass me those names because I’m sure if I write them down, I’m never going to get it right myself. If you can pass them to me later, that would be great. And Elmir, continuing with the recommendations, and I know you’ve also been working from different perspectives on these learning projects. Is there any book that you would recommend? The engagers? Again, people who like you were thinking of using this, and maybe in learning or maybe in any other setting anywhere, from inspiration to direct stuff or even indirect things that you might not have thought of before.

Elmir:
As a PhD student, I mostly read academic papers, but no, I have one recommendation. So the book survival of the Friend list by Brian Heyer and Vanessa woods. So it’s completely not about game based solution, but it’s something about deeper principles, I would say. So the main idea of that book is that survival is not competition, but rather cooperation and positive social interaction and empathy bring a lot of benefits. And we can transmit this empathy through the game, through the interface players interact with, through the tone of voice we use to communicate with people and through kindness to diverse participants.

Rob:
Interesting. Very, very interesting. Thank you for that recommendation. Very good one. And we’ve talked about recommendations of other people, you know, books that you recommend with the experience that you’ve had. Now, would you say that you have some form of superpower? One thing that you feel that you do at least better than most other people. Again, it doesn’t have to be exclusive. You’re the only one in the world who does this. Something that you feel is something you are able to do great in this or maybe even other projects and then feel you stand out with.

Elmir:
Like people usually say that I have the power to create some engaging things so that I transform boring into something that’s really interesting to interact with. So I don’t know. For example, a few years ago we created an interactive series with different pathways about corporate compliance laws. Also we created a journalistic detective manner electronic course about sales and other stuff that is really juicy and can compete with content from social media.

Rob:
Amazing. Sounds like very useful as well.

Elmir:
Yeah, I hope so.

Rob:
Elmir, we get to the really difficult question now, what would you say is your favorite game?

Elmir:
Oh, civilization for sure. No, I have a few. So the first one is civilization, monopoly and red Dead redemption. Two.

Rob:
Okay, so you have video game. Well, one is sort of more turn based video game, and then Red Dead Redemption is more of an rpg. And then you have monopoly as a physical board game. If you had to choose, which one would it be?

Elmir:
Oh, it’s very difficult. I think that I will choose either civilization or monopoly, but probably monopoly. Yeah, monopoly.

Rob:
That’s a tough one, right?

Elmir:
Yes. I especially like people. You know, sometimes you play with some friends this game, and when they don’t have money and they don’t have property, they act, oh, no, I don’t have money. Please give me something. Help me to buy. And after that, they have everything, and they, like, treated, feel like you are no one in this game. It’s very funny. I love it.

Rob:
It’s an interesting one, for sure. And there have been many spinoffs and different games that come out of. So interesting choice. Elmir, I can’t thank you enough for being up and taking on this interview. I was very excited to see when we, I found out through LinkedIn that you had this implementation and you’re doing all these things because being able to share what people that have, where we have shared a journey in one way or another, what you have achieved is something that I’m very proud of sharing as well. So thanks again for being available, for being in for this. I don’t know if you have any final piece of advice, anything else you want to say to the engagers before we leave? And, of course, if there’s anywhere you want to lead them to see your work or, I don’t know, a webpage you want to lead them to, this is the right time.

Elmir:
Oh, I think that we discussed almost everything today, so I just want to say thank you for inviting me here. It was a big pleasure. And for our listeners, if they want to contact me, please connect me and link it in. I’ll be really happy.

Rob:
Amazing. Amazing. So, if you want to look for this episode on the show notes page, Elmir. E l M I R. Again, my pronunciation might be terrible, so you might never find it. That is the way to find it. You type Elmir. E l M I R. M I R. Once again, thank you very much for being here. Thank you, engagers, for listening to this episode. Hopefully, you will be inspired as well as Elmir was to go ahead and start your own projects. However, Elmir, however, engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game aware. Hey, engagers. And thank you for listening to the professor game podcast and as you heard during the interview, this is our first time interviewing a past participant of one of our workshops, and it definitely is something that’s been on my mind for a while. I have, you know, mention this to other workshop participants, but I’d like to know, is this something that you would like to hear more of? To hear their ups and downs, how they overcame the obstacles in the workshop, what were their difficulties, the things that did go well? I don’t know. Even if you have any questions, I’d love to hear that from you. So if you go to professorgame.com, subscribe and get started on our email list, which is absolutely for fRee, you can just reply to one of those emails and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear read it from you. And of course, if you’re already on the email list, just find one of our past emails and hit reply. And again, as always, as usual, remember before you go on to your next mission, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Gain. See you there.

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