An Autoethnographic Perspective on Teaching Soft Skills Using Multiplayer Online Games

Soft skills, such as communication and collaboration are seen as essential for professional life. In formal education, soft skills are still underrepresented as learning objectives. To strengthen soft skills in higher education, we developed a course for undergraduate students in civil engineering. The course works with generic tasks provided by the commercial massively multiplayer online game EVE Online. The overarching research question is, to what extent the course actually trains soft skills. After first promising pilot evaluations, 22 autoethnographic essays, which the participants completed as a final assignment at the end of the course, are subject to a qualitative analysis in this study. In particular, aspects of learning, motivation, and didactic design are examined. The results confirm the findings of the pilot evaluations, in particular the development of soft skills was confirmed by the participants. Regarding motivation, it was surprising that the essays argued less with fun than with benefits for later professional life. In the context of didactic design, the suitability of the game EVE Online was questioned due to its great complexity. Also critical for the success of the course is the lack of confidence of the participants as well as their social environment in the learning effectiveness of games. Overall, this study thus provides guidance for the further development of the course including additional evaluations, which could make the course a broadly deployable learning scenario for soft skills training.