Karma

Karma measures the participation of a stakeholder in the learning game

A crucial feature of the learning game is that of karma. Every stakeholder has a varying amount of karma during the learning process. Initially, all stakeholders will have a minimum of karma.

Students' karma can increase through virtuous actions. A virtuous action is a behavior that increases the intrinsic value of the class in view of the primary objective of the game, which is the effective and homogeneous transfer of knowledge. For example, a student might investigate a new topic and expose it to the entire class. This increases everyone's knowledge, including the teacher's.

The notion of karma is important also because it gives the teacher the possibility to measure the class performance, that is how an instance of the game achieved its goal. Assuming that a student's karma is a proxy for participation in the class, and that the latter is positively correlated with the knowledge acquired by the student during the class (the strength of this correlation depending on many factors), it holds that the aim of the game - the homogeneous dissemination of knowledge - is achieved when:

1. The average of students’ karma $\mu$ is large compared to the initial average $\mu_0$

2. The standard deviation $\sigma$ of students’ karma is low (close to zero)

We define a Learning Return Index $\rho$ of the class as the ratio of the increase of the average karma (with respect to the initial stage) and the karma standard deviation.

$$\rho = \frac{\mu - \mu_0}{\sigma}$$

The higher the index, the more the learning game has achieved its goal. A good class is one in which everyone has learned a lot. Situations to avoid are classes in which everyone has learned little, or a few have learned a lot and many have acquired little.

Generated with DALL-Ewith prompt: Karma indicates, in Indian religions and philosophies, the generic acting to achieve an end, Hieronymus Bosch style